Cellular Mobile Network Final Report Stay Anonymous “TURN OFF THE LIGHTS”

Siyang Wu, sw2848

Farzaneh Motahari, fm2475 Marcus Hsu, mh3346 Li Yang Lu, ll2887

1.Introduction As soon as the Internet developed, the means of communication over the Internet developed, too. We’re in a world where most everything we do is public. You can be more of yourself where you aren’t as concerned about crafting the right message. And there are many ephemeral / anonymous app company that came before including Whisper, Secret, Snapchat, and Confide. Just evoke memories of sleepover parties and summer camp cabins. But just like in your friend’s basement, where you might speak more freely amongst friends as you gaze upwards at the ceiling, telling who’s who in our app isn’t as hard as you think. Our app isn’t Secret, where a revealed identity could very likely cost somebody their job. In addition to the above situations, there are a lot more situations where people’s right to speak anonymously need to be protected. The issue of anonymity on the internet is an important one and establishing such an environment is also important for either formal or informal purposes. Moreover, Partner Finding is also an important feature for users to use. Many of us are living far from our families. When moving to a new university, work we might not have a lot of friends and families around us. There are times that you might really want to play a game, go to a movie, go hiking or other fun activities, but due to limited number of friends around us, we find ourselves alone in doing all these activities. So partnerFinding is a preliminary implementation of such application. You can post an event, like playing tennis or going to SpiderMan and give some details of when or where you want to meet people and people can join you. Since this is a preliminary implementation of this feature a lot of functionalities can be added to it in future works.

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A complete implementations of our solution can be used by large communities such as universities or other organizations and it can include many sub parts. While it can include anonymous chat for providing more freedom in expressing your ideas, it can also include other features which can be used by members of that community. Currently two parts of it have been initially implemented which embraces anonymous chat/vote and partner finding. There can be other extensions added to this application.

2.Our Solution Demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78IWUoJe5vc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDJuWruUc40 Our slogan of the app is “TURN OFF THE LIGHTS". In view of the above situations, our goal is developing an app that will help users express their thoughts without displaying their identities. This kind of space — which is anonymous, yet personal — doesn’t really exist in the world. Google Cloud platform will always know who is really talking in the chatroom. So for our app, which runs on Android that lets you carry out anonymous group chats with friends. The idea sounds like an oxymoron, but is more nuanced than you might think. Instructor(who creates the chatroom) can share the name of the room to everyone but everybody inside the chat window itself remains nameless, designated only by different colored regarding to the initial characters of what they said. In other words, you’ll probably know which ten friends are in your chat, but you won’t know who’s saying what. Or it may be the scenario like the instructor knows that all the students within the class have already joined the chatroom but doesn’t know who is speaking. The more people there are in the chat, the less likely you’ll know who’s who. We perfectly combine Chat/Vote and Partner Finding together. For instance, a Columbia student Leon Lu wants to join an event sharing sexual experiences and techniques or how to prevent sexual assaults in Columbia.(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/nyregion/accusations­over­assault­at­columbia.html?_r=1) But before joining the event, Leon doesn’t want others know that he goes to this event because he is too shy to let his friend know that he needs to improve his sexual techniques. In fact, only people did go to the event will know who exactly attended the event at the event site. Unlike Facebook event which will indicate who is going to attend an event publicly or maybe going to an event. This app will allow users remain anonymous until he/she actually shows up. What’s more, during the event, instructor wants to have a very sensitive discussion with all the students in the classroom. Attendees can use this app to say whatever they want using the app.

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3.Implementation The implementation of our app is divided into two part : Chat/Vote and Partner­Finding. Since both parts have heavy interactions with the Internet, we must provide a robust and reliable front­end/back­end architectures. At first, we were choosing between several well known backend­service providers, such as Amazon EC2, Google App Engine or Heroku etc. After analysing the pros and cons of all possible candidates, we finally decided to choose the Google Mobile Backend Starter (abbreviated to MBS in later context) as our backend server. The MBS is a backend interface provided by google to support those who don’t have the resource/technique to set up a server while a properly set up server is a critical component in their app. The underlie server of MBS is actually the Google App Engine. MBS can be treated as a simple pre­built version of Google App Engine, which supports strong apis for put/extract entities to/from the cloud through several lines of api calls from the client side. Besides, rather than coding in an unfamiliar server environment and dealing with so many server side implementations, MBS provides the mobile developers an off the shelf server as a service while retaining the flexibility and scalability of the server if the business scale is going to another level. The following are the basic ideas of how we take advantages of this pre­built app engine. Noticing the fact that our app is event/chat­room based, we first came up with a method of mapping our event/chat­room into a CloudEntity. (A brief deviation here, a CloudEntity is a row of a table in the cloud, which allows developers to customize their columns names and corresponding values, for instance the following code demonstrates of how to put “123” in the “sid” column in a table called “Student” : CloudEntity student = new CloudEntity(“Student”); student.put(“sid”, “123“); // backendProcessor is an instance of Class that takes cares of backend // requests/responds backendProcessor.insert(student, taskFinishCallback); ) We used the same idea to implement our event/chat­room. We define every event/room as a table, and all messages and functions are records. Let’s see another example of how to separate chat and vote functions in one room (same CloudEntiy) :

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// This section of code illustrates of how to put things to the cloud CloudEntity room = new CloudEntity(“Room1”); // We use api to separate different features in a room // There are several apis, ex : chat, vote etc if(isChatting)

room.put(“api”,”chat”); room.put(“message”, “hello everyone”);

else if(isVoting) room.put(“api”,”vote”); room.put(“voteDetails”, “Vote for fun”);

backendProcessor.insert(room, onTaskFinishCallback); // This section shows how to get things from the cloud OnTaskFinishCallback onTaskFinishCallback = new OnTaskFinishCallback

public void onTaskFinish(List<CloudEntity> result) // this function will be called along with the result when the query is done.

backendProcessor.query(“Room1”, onTaskFinishCallback); Above are just the idea of of how the Android client communicated with the MBS. The following part are details of Android side implementation.

Overall architecture

Our app has two parts : chat/vote and partner­finding. We designed a framework with several dynamic fragments that best presents these two features.

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As you can see, the transparent container in the middle is the fragment, you can swipe left/right to access to different features.

Chat/Vote implementation For the chatting part. We have 2 options for every one that uses this app. The first page is Enter a room. Ordinary users should type in the name of the room, which uniquely identifies the room. We also did some abnormal check for entering the id of the room. For example, if “Orange” has not been created, users cannot enter the room, as the following 2 pictures show:

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The second page is for instructors who creates a new room. Instructors just have to type in the room name. We will also use new a CloudBackend() to do the check for the name of the room. If the room has been created, then a error message will pop up which tells the instructor that the room has been created before, as the 2 following pictures show(room “Apple” has already been created, so the error page will pop up):

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For the voting part, we first check whether the user is ordinary user or instructor. If the user enters a room by typing a name and press “enter”, then the user is an ordinary user, so the user can’t vote. But if the user type in a room name and then clicks“create”, then the user will become an instructor and will have the permission to raise a vote. (as the picture on the right side shows) We only give the permission to instructor to raise a vote. When the instructor clicks the “vote” button, a dialog will pop out and let her do the voting. The voting mechanism is actually quite intuitive. First the instructor will use that pop out dialog to set up a vote, including title, details, number of options and etc. Second, after the instructor raised the vote, all other users in this room will receive a pop out dialog showing the details and options of the vote. All of the users have the right to vote for the options or to waive their rights. And if they decide to vote for a particular candidate, the result will be transmitted to the instructor. The instructor, after receiving all the votes (she has the right to decide either to keep waiting for more votes or calculate the result), can calculate the result and broadcast the result to all the users in the room.

UI/UX Design In this part we’ll discuss about our UI design. First let’s discuss the UI design in terms of the UI design heuristics. According to the very first UI heuristic ­­ Visibility of system status, while freezing the UI for some underlie tasks, we show a progress bar indicating the user that the system is actually working but not crashing. Besides, we also followed the minimal design and aesthetic perspective, we put as less information as possible in each page so that we won’t distract the user from what’s really important. For instance, instead of writing another title for the “enter the room” text field, we chose to put the title inside the text field as a hint. This approach not only reduced the use of space but also reduced the potential confusion that might affect the users’ experience. In terms of

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designing the fragment pager, we chose a barely visible container in order to hint the user the existence of the fragment in a non distracting way, therefore the user would be aware of the manipulability of the container. On the bottom of the container, there is an image saying “Swipe right to enter a room” with a picture of a hand swiping from right to left. This helps the user to recognize how to interact with our UI instead of making them to memorize it, which is also an important thing to think about. In terms of the implementation point of view, we use the ViewPager of the Android support v4 library. The ViewPager basically takes care of adding and removing fragments. We designed our tasks in a modular manner so that every task can be handled by one single fragment, and since the dynamic of the ViewPager, it is easy for us to add more functionalities later in the future.

Partner finding Implementation For CreateEventActivity class ,GUI created and for functionality CloudBackEndAsync class and its methods are used to subscribe for subscribing for cloud messaging and inserting the data to the schema at cloud storage. For EventListActivity, We used CloudQuery class instance to fire a query to data base and CloudBackendAsync class to retrieve the list of events. On clicking any item in the list ,it show the details about the event. Projects starts from a launching activity which is SelectionActivity and it is defined as Launcher activity in menifest file. Here there are two buttons :1.for creating events 2.Find partner for any event from available list. On clicking create button, CreateActivity activity opens with all related fields. Here we have two buttons,either create an event or cancel it. On clicking create button,it checks for all values input and then create CloudBackendMessaging object and subscribe for cloud messaging. Creating CloudEntity instance and add all properties to it. Sending the message using sendCloudMessage() method of CloudBackendMessaging class. Now the second button in SelectionActivity is to find partener: On clicking the button controller goes to EventListActivity activity, where in onCreate() query is created with CloudQuery class instance and order and scope is passed to it. After creating query ,using CloudBackendAsync class instance, list() method of the same class is called which returns list of events from cloud storage. As it returns the list, we call a method named as deleteEvent() method to check for date of events and if any event exist with the date which is already passed,then a new thread is initialized to delete that event. Inside the thread delete() method of CloudBackendMessaging class is called using the same class instance. And,also that event is removed from the list which is returned from

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server. Here, EventListAdaptor,which is a custom list adaptor, called to generate the list. In EventListAdaptor, getView() method is responsible for creating a list item view.Here, item click listener is added to complete row. When an item is clicked ,all relevant data to the row are passed to intent and hence to next activity which is ShowEventActivity. Finally the event data are displayed in this activity. In essence, PartnerFinding stores every event content including event date, host’s name, event detail, etc. Sync all event to every phone automatically in a very short period of time, ie. less than a minute. Sort the event in a list by hosting date, and will be updated when the events are passed. It will be clearly indicate what happens in runtime. For example, when the backend finish uploading the request data(event detail), it will toast a message to indicate the back processing status.

4.Conclusion To conclude, the main goal of this app is to let the users chat and find their partners anonymously. Since nowadays one of our most important assets, the identity, is prone to be abused by the transparency of the Internet, we should’ve provided it a protection shell. Our app is that shell. We focus on casual anonym, which eases your life starting from your daily perspective. By using our app, now you can join the meetings that you weren’t dare to try so just because of you were afraid of exposing your participance of that event. With our app, now you can express your true thoughts among your friends or agree/disagree with your manager in a private room for your product team without worrying about the “price” of saying your true opinions. Although for now it’s just in the basic phase of the app, we believe in time our app will be a great help for others.

5.Future Add a random delay of time to push message on the chat board Encode the message by RSA to make the messages perfectly secure In partner finding many fun additional functionalities can be added. When

the host specifies the number of required people to play a game with, people can join, the number can be dropped with every one person joining the event and can increase up to the required number when people leave the event.

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It may allow you to reserve a playground within the university when you are posting the event.

6. Member Contribution Allen: Anonymous Chatting and helping integrate Partner Finding part and report Farzaneh Motahari: Developing Partner Finding application, preparing associated report Leon Lu: Overall Design, Voting Part, UI design, integration of all parts and report Marcus: Developing and Integrate Partner Finding part (UI & functions), and report

7.Reference 1.https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/ 2.https://cloud.google.com/developers/articles/mobile­backend­starter 3.https://developers.google.com/cloud/samples/mbs/deploy_backend

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