:: blog.profoundparables.org ::

“Do you not see that God is the one who is praised by all (creatures) in the heavens and on earth, (even by) the birds (of the air) with wings outspread? Each one knows its own (mode of) prayer and praise.”

The Holy Quran, 24:41

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) sought God’s pardon for his people and received the reply: “I have forgiven all but acts of oppression, for I shall exact recompense for the one who is wronged from his oppressor.”

A colleague of mine, vonaurum, has created a humorous/semi-humorous/satirical Philosophical Periodic Table. It can be accessed at: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~maa2454/ptable/

It is an ongoing project and any comments or suggestions are welcomed.

You may visit vonaurum’s blog in my links section: “The Best of Possible Worlds”

“Invite (all) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching, and reason with them in the most courteous manner. For your Lord knows best who strays from His path and He knows best who is rightly guided.”

The Holy Quran, 16:125

I was taking a course this quarter called Technology Transfer, a requirement for my degree.

The description of the course is as follows:

Technology transfer is an umbrella term that refers to the creation, adoption and consequences of new technologies in a variety of settings. This course looks at how a new idea becomes implemented in a system (an organization or society) and the factors that influence the adoption of a new idea. This course also looks at the influence of individuals and groups within the change process and how they affect the acceptance of new ideas. Finally, the course explores the prediction and consequences of new technologies.

In this course, we had learned about the Diffusion Theory and in the basis of innovativeness there were five adopter categories.

Here are the 6 key aspects of the Diffusion Theory:
1. Adopters pass through stages as they accept or reject change.
2. People adopt at different rates.
3. People are influenced by opinion leaders.*
4. Gatekeepers control access to information.
5. Individuals are connected by communication links.
6. Interpersonal influences produce change.

Below is the general percentage of the adopter categories that exist and their characteristics.

2.5% - Innovators - Rash
13.5% - Early Adopters - Respect
34% - Early Majority - Reasoned, Risk-Adverse
34% - Late Majority - Reluctant
16% - Laggards - Resistant

According to “What is the 1% rule?”: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1823959,00.html?gusrc=rss,
“It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.”

“Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).”

“Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that much the same applies at Yahoo: in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, “1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups,” he noted on his blog (www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5) in February.”

Charles Author believes that the “builders” are rare and from my experience it is true that only a few amped individuals with visions step up to the plate. Having long-term visions with practical implementations does take much effort and hardwork but without the proper motivation there is no gain either. Those who are confident in what they do and are also aware of their surroundings are usually the ones that lead. Goals are innate responsibilities for leaders and without a destination there is no essential path. It is also interesting to know that people are attracted to strength. If an individual is noticed to perform duties or responsibilies with positive energy, others will follow.

Above I have one of the key aspects of the diffusion theory followed by an asterisks. In my Tech Transfer course, we also learned about two different types of leaders. There are Formal Leaders and Informal Leaders (Opinion Leaders). The Formal Leaders may be well known by a community but may also just be influential to a group of people. Opinion Leaders on the other hand exist in many different groups or cliques and influence more on a day-to-day basis through social and personal interaction.

Finally, a leader is one who continues to acknowledge to be always a student and not just a teacher, with patience, understanding and the willingness to learn. This also means that the balance between personal development and public endeavors must be maintained.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “The good deeds of any person will not make him enter Paradise (i.e., no one enters paradise only through his good deeds).” The Prophet’s companions asked: “Not even you?” The Prophet replied: “Not even myself, unless God bestows His favor and mercy on me. So be moderate in your religious deeds and do what is within your ability. None of you should wish for death, for if he is a doer of good, he may increase his good deeds, and if he is an evil doer, he may repent to God.”

Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume 7, Hadith 577

“(On the Day of Judgment) the Earth will shine with the glory of its Lord. The record (of everyone’s deeds) will be laid bare, the Prophets and other witnesses will be brought forward, and justice shall be done between people with all fairness. None shall be wronged. And every soul will be paid in full according to its deeds.”

The Holy Quran, 39:69-70

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “It is better for a leader to make a mistake in forgiving than to make a mistake in punishing.”

Al-Tirmidhi, Hadith 1011

The Rainbow Table is the time used to take a cracking computation and storing those results in files. This is the technique Philippe Oechslin developed in order to implement a faster time-memory trade-off. Ophcrack is an example of a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables in order to crack Windows passwords.

Some business oriented hackers decided that they start a RainbowCrack service by allowing anyone to pay a subscription fee and provide password hashes to crack.
http://www.rainbowcrack-online.com/

“Because of the problems, the U.S. government is requiring that banks move towards two-factor authentication, where the typical password security is augmented by a biometric or a physical security device. Some security researchers maintain that even adding a second type of security check is not enough.”
“Rainbow tables side step the difficulty in cracking a single password by instead creating a large data set of hashes from nearly every possible password. To break a password, the attacker merely looks up the hash to find the password that produces that code.”
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11355

More on Rainbow Tables can be found at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table

Any one-way hash that includes a salt is ineffective to a rainbow table and can be a
defense. In cryptography, a key derivative function is a hash function derived from one or
more secret keys from secret values/information. Salts consists of random bits used as one
of the key derivative function inputs.

“MS-Windows is one of the rare operating systems, with few routers, firewalls and databases, that uses salt-less hashes, making the attack possible. Both hashes found in Windows, the LanManager hash and the NT hash have no salt.”
“If you don’t want your password to be cracked, you should definitely stay away from the LanManager hash (you can disable it in Windows 2000, XP and 2003).”
https://www.isc2.org/cgi-bin/content.cgi?page=738

Jim Moore, an Information Security Officer from the Rochester Institute of Technology states:
“A couple of weeks ago I was at the New York State Cyber-Security Conference. It was there that a presenter with good knowledge of the black hat community said that 16 character rainbow tables would be done by the end of 2006.”
http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0607&L=security&T=0&H=1&P=2422

It will soon be normal to have larger than atleast 16 characters as a password. Get ready for a security break-through. This is the future of technology.
An advice for everybody involved or using technology in anyway, change your passwords regularly (make them longer as well) and backup ALL IMPORTANT data.

I had recently received a CD of a Muslim sister ‘Miss Undastood’

“From the age of 18 onwards Miss Undastood got writers block. Everything that came to her was Islamic. “People didn’t understand me.” She says, hence her name Miss Undastood.”

After some hiphop research I crossed a site with muslim artists involved in the hiphop culture. InshAllah their efforts to positively reach other muslims and nonmuslims will be successful.

After Hijra
Amir Sulaiman
belikeMuhammad
Blakstone
DJ Cee Life
ElevenFiftyNine
Eloquence
Jamila
Kalasoul
Kumasi
M-Team
Mecca2Medina
MeccaCentric
Mickey Boston
Miss Undastood
MPAC
Mr. Ameen
Mustafa Abdul-Basit
Native Deen
Osama in London
Pillar 5
Reason Rule
Samir
Sister Haero
Sonz of the Crescent
Tahir Rashid
The Brothahood
Tyson

Check out these artists and their bios : http://muslimhiphop.com/index.php?p=Hip-Hop