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Project Proposal

Feasibility Study

Design Document

Final Report

Our Proposal

The essence of the software that we aim to build is an application that runs in the background during meetings which detects when an attendee starts to record the screen.

The Problem

To understand the motivation behind us building a screen capture detector, imagine the following scenarios:

• A confidential meeting between a team of people who are discussing an important matter. This meeting cannot happen in person because of the lockdown, and no trace of the meeting should be left after it is over. Obviously, the meeting should not be recorded. It would be a problem if an attendee records the screen of his device using the inbuilt functionalities provided by its operating system. This gives rise to a need to stop screen recording, or at least detect it.

• Another less critical, but more common incident is online class. Lazy and demotivated students do not pay attention in class, instead, they record the meeting so they can watch it later. Without active participation from the students, the class is less interactive, and provides a poor quality of education. If there was no way to record the screen, then the student has no choice but to attend class and pay attention. This, again, calls for a software to detect screen capture.

What our software will do

In order to solve the problem described above, our software essentially detects screen capture by any attendee, and informs the organizer of the meeting. The following steps would be taken to use our software:

• The organizer of the meeting creates a ‘room’ in our software which the attendees will join.

• Each of the attendees will need to have installed our software on their device. Our software runs on the attendees’ devices throughout the meeting, and as soon as it detects the sub-process that runs when the screen is recorded, it notifies the organizer of the meeting.

• The organizer can see the list of attendees. The screen capture notification shows up next to the name of the attendee that starts recording.

• As we can deduce, the organizer will not know if the attendee is recording the screen if the software is not installed on the attendee’s device.

• Hence, to ensure zero screen capture, we can suggest (enforce) the teacher (organizer of meeting) to take attendance through this software so that the students (attendees) MUST have this software installed and running.

Why this is a good project for a team of 6 developers

There are many aspects to this project:

• We need to understand operating systems to know which sub-processes run when a screen is being recorded.

• We need an application running on the device of each attendee and meeting organizer.

• We must also create a server application that coordinates between the members of the meeting and creates the room.

• We must also design and develop a front-end user interface for the meeting organizer to see the attendees.

The above tasks can be divided among the members of our team, and we aim to comfortably finish building the software within the given time frame.