Instant Messaging System Research Articles

Investigation into Information Literacy and the Use of Web 2.0 Technologies in a Faculty of Architecture

Following a rapid development in technology, many information sources are now digitized. Consequently, individuals are expected to demonstrate the skills needed to critically evaluate, synthesize, and effectively use those sources. In this context, information literacy and information technology, especially skills with Web 2.0 tools, have become concepts that directly affect each other’s development. This study investigated the information literacy self-efficacy and use of Web 2.0 tools among architectural students in particular. A t-test and ANOVA were performed on the data collected through a questionnaire survey. The results revealed that there was no difference in information literacy self-efficacy according to the participants’ gender or duration of internet use but did vary with the level of their knowledge of foreign languages and Web 2.0 tools. In addition, instant messaging systems were the most preferred of the Web 2.0 tools to use for educational purposes. Ranked from most to least preferred, other Web 2.0 tools included Facebook–Twitter, video sharing platforms, blogs, wikis, and podcasts.

Key Escrow Protocol Based on a Tripartite Authenticated Key Agreement and Threshold Cryptography

While instant messaging systems bring convenience to people's lives and work, they also make it easier for malicious users to discuss and plot illegal activities. Therefore, determining how to balance the privacy protection requirements of user communication in the network with the authorized monitoring requirements of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) is a meaningful task. To solve this problem, a new tripartite authenticated key agreement (Tri-AKA) protocol and a session key escrow scheme based on threshold cryptography and the new Tri-AKA protocol were proposed. In the proposed scheme, the LEA participates as a normal user in the key agreement process of two users and uses (t, n) threshold cryptography to share its ephemeral private key with n key escrow agents (KEAs). When necessary, the LEA can combine t KEAs to recover the specified session key and decrypt the communications, thereby preventing malicious administrators in the LEA from arbitrarily monitoring user communications. Finally, we proved the security of the proposed Tri-AKA protocol under the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption with the Random Oracle Model and the security of the proposed key escrow scheme under the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm (ECDL) assumption. Analysis of our session key escrow scheme and comparison with other schemes show that our scheme can avoid the “once monitor, monitor forever” scenario and achieve fine-grained control in each session. Moreover, our scheme has low storage overhead for each KEA.

Koncepcja informatycznych narzędzi komunikacji wewnętrznej w sądach powszechnych

The article presents the use of IT communication tools as a good practice in the activities of the Polish judicial system. The concept of good practice came into being during the implementation of the pilot project of good management of the subordinate units of the Polish Ministry of Justice as a part of the projects “Education in the time and cost management of judicial proceedings – case management”, with the financial resources granted from the European Social Fund within the framework of Human Capital. The aim of the good practice “IT tools for internal communication” is to improve the quality and speed of internal communication across all organisational levels and units by introducing an intranet platform. The platform replaces traditional (paper) communication with an e-mail channel that makes it possible to attach documents (i.e. letters, decrees, policy descriptions, procedures), send direct messages (i.e. instant messaging system) and archive. Implementing the internal platform increases communication efficiency and cost savings. The article presents the assumptions of the good practice, the technology involved in it and the stages of the implementation within the project.

Use of Social Networking Site and Mental Disorders among Medical Students in Kolkata, West Bengal.

Background:Use of social networking sites (SNS) and prevalence of anxiety and depression among the young population is on the rise.Objectives:The aim of this study is to assess the pattern of use of SNS and the prevalence of anxiety and depression among medical students as well as to examine the relation, if any, between the use of SNS and anxiety and depression.Methods:A cross-sectional study was conducted among 200 undergraduate students of a medical college in Kolkata, West Bengal during 2017. Information on individual characteristics and use of SNS of medical students were collected using a structured questionnaire. Anxiety and depression were measured using State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and becks depression inventory (BDI). Prevalence was expressed in percentage and association was examined with Mann–Whitney U-test.Results:More than 90% of students use more than one SNS or instant messaging system. One-third remained active in SNSs all through the day and around 80% for ≥4 h. Use of SNSs during odd hours was reported by 55% participants, and 23.5% expressed their inability to spend a day without SNSs. Nearly 24% reported depression and 68.5% had state anxiety. STAI and BDI scores were significantly (P < 0.05) higher among students who used SNSs for 4 h or more, used it during odd hours or stated inability to spend a day without SNSs than their counterparts.Conclusion:The use of SNS by medical students was pervasive. More use of SNSs and dependence on it were associated with anxiety and depression.

Enhanced Instant Message Security and Privacy Protection Scheme for Mobile Social Network Systems

Instant messaging (IM) systems can be considered the most frequently used applications in mobile social networks. Nowadays, people are becoming increasingly concerned about data security and privacy protection with IM applications. Therefore, a comprehensive enhanced secure IM scheme was proposed in this paper, which is based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem and the advanced encryption standard algorithm. An offline key agreement process between users was designed under the computational Diffie–Hellman (CDH) assumption by updating the ephemeral key periodically. The proposed scheme supports denial of replaying attack and denial of forgery attack by utilizing timestamps and the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm. It supports multiple types of messages (such as document and multimedia messages) and prevents privacy leakage by storing sent and received messages with ciphertext. We proved the security of the proposed scheme under the elliptic curve discrete logarithm assumption and the CDH assumption. The comparison results of the proposed scheme with other schemes and the results of an experiment show that it is a comprehensive secure scheme with high security and good practicability.

Design of Instant Messaging System of Multi-language E-commerce Platform

This paper aims at researching the message system in the instant messaging system based on the multi-language e-commerce platform in order to design the instant messaging system in multi-language environment and exhibit the national characteristics based information as well as applying national languages to e-commerce. In order to develop beautiful and friendly system interface for the front end of the message system and reduce the development cost, the mature jQuery framework is adopted in this paper. The high-performance server Tomcat is adopted at the back end to process user requests, and MySQL database is adopted for data storage to persistently store user data, and meanwhile Oracle database is adopted as the message buffer for system optimization. Moreover, AJAX technology is adopted for the client to actively pull the newest data from the server at the specified time. In practical application, the system has strong reliability, good expansibility, short response time, high system throughput capacity and high user concurrency.

EIMAKP: Heterogeneous Cross-Domain Authenticated Key Agreement Protocols in the EIM System

In recent years, instant messaging (IM) has increasingly become a popular communication technology around the world, and the enterprise instant messaging (EIM) system is one of IM’s applications for enterprise use. The existing studies of EIM systems are directed at the design of functional components and the process of communication, which are usually based on XMPP protocol suite. However, in this paper, the security of EIM is more concerned from another perspective, which is the problem of identity authentication and key agreement between users and services. Several EIM systems are based on public key infrastructure (PKI) to achieve the high-security requirements of enterprises, while identity-based cryptography (IBC) brings new development direction for EIM systems. Although most of the EIM applications are applied independently in different enterprises, users’ heterogeneous cross-domain service access has become an inevitable trend. However, there is still no heterogeneous cross-domain authentication protocol between the PKI domain and the IBC domain having been proposed. Therefore, in order to address this problem, a novel and detailed heterogeneous cross-domain authenticated key agreement scheme is proposed in this paper. By utilizing the PKI-based distributed trust model and the access authorization tickets, this scheme can realize interconnection and seamless authentication between the PKI domain and the IBC domain. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme is theoretically correct, while guaranteeing high security and efficiency.

Multimedia Instant Messaging with Real-time Attribute-based Encryption

Today, Online Social Network (OSN) has emerged as the pervasive form of media connecting people from all over the world. Among the core functionalities associated with OSN, Instant Messaging (IM) plays a critical role in real-time communication between those virtual online communities. As the growth in IM usage continues, it has become the primary means of communication within business, education, and everyday life. Meanwhile, privacy management and data protection are issues that remain paramount to the future development of IM technology. In this work, we focus on the data protection and privacy management of group chat where multiple users simultaneously connect to a central server for real-time communications. We describe a novel multimedia IM system supporting user defined security control over real-time communication in a multiuser environment. The attribute-based encryption (ABE) is employed by the system to provide access control over transmitted user messages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the new ABE key management mechanism provides a flexible and effective solution to data protection and privacy management for real-time online communication in multiuser environments.

The relationship between use of Web 2.0 tools by prospective science teachers and their biotechnology literacy

The purpose of this study is to determine use of Web 2.0 tools (frequency of using Web 2.0 tools, duration of access to social networks, intentions for using Web 2.0 by prospective science teachers) and to investigate the relationship between the use of these technologies and biotechnology literacy. The study was designed as a correlational research. The sample consisted of conveniently selected 101 prospective science teachers at the senior level. Data was collected by “Biotechnology Literacy Test” and “Survey of Web 2.0 Technology Use”. The data was analyzed by Pearson correlation test and calculating frequencies. Findings showed that the prospective science teachers mostly preferred to use Web 2.0 tools for fun. They also preferred to use the tools for exchange of knowledge, reaching current resources, and web-based learning and research. Moreover they used social networks to follow daily news. Also prospective teachers use social networks mostly to follow the current events. The participants rarely preferred to use social networks to follow education clubs, to make research for their projects and homework as well. As the other aspect of this study, the relationship analysis showed that level of the participants' biotechnology literacy were positively correlated with time of using internet, frequency of using social networks, frequency of using blogs, wikis, and instant messaging system, and duration of being a member of a social network.

Exploring factors of user’s peer-influence behavior in social media on purchase intention: Evidence from QQ

How to leverage the interactions and peer-influences among online friends to motivate users’ purchase willingness and improve marketing performance has been a hot research issue in human behavior based on social media. In our research, we extracted the dataset of users’ purchasing membership services on QQ, the biggest online instant message system in China, to explore the main factors of user’s peer-influence behavior on promoting purchase in social media. Through a series of elaborate experiments, we obtained some valuable results. First, though the high-degree users who have a lot of online friends will influence more followers to purchase the services, the proportion of friends involved in the purchase is actually comparatively lower than some low-degree users. At the same time, the “neighbor-press effect” induced from a user’s connected friends having purchased will bring obvious positive impact on promoting this user’s purchase willingness. Finally, the length of most purchase chains (about 80%) is within two nodes, which verifies that the purchase diffusion is more confined in the small-scale “circle of friends”. Our results indicate that peer-influence purchase is less likely to be due to the influence of higher degree users but is more related to the number of prior adoptions (predecessors) in the user’s social neighborhood. The achievements of this study will provide deep technical supports for strategic planning and implementation in the social marketing practice.

미디어 제어 채널을 사용한 분산 인스턴트 메시지 시스템 구조

ABSTRACT In this paper, a distributed instant message system with multiple servers architecture which can distribute system load effectively using an extended media control channel has been presented. A media control channel provides establishing a reliable control channel and also keeping a reliable control channel between SIP server and client in the field of real-time media transport area. In this study, a new instant message system architecture which can distribute massive instant message including multimedia data to multiple servers has been presented. The presented instant message system architecture can distribute system load by extending media control channel. For this purpose, media control channel messages, which distribute system load to multiple servers dynamically according to increasing number of users, have been designed in our presented system. And, in our research, an exchanging procedures of media control channel messages between servers have also been presented. The performance of the proposed system has been analysed by simulation.

Real Time Social Network Data Analysis for Community Detection

WWW becomes a widely used platform for different social networks and social medias for the social communication. This platform becomes the oasis of a huge amount of data. Therefore, this data repository draws tremendous attention from corporate, government, NGOs, social workers, politician, etc. to either promote their products or to convey their message to the targeted community. But identification of community structure and social graph becomes a challenging issue for the social network researcher and graph theory researchers since the pervasive usage of instant messaging systems and fundamental shift in publishing contents in these social medias. Although a lot of attention has been given by the researcher to introduce several algorithms for identifying the community structure, most of them are not suitable for dealing with the large scale social network data in real time. This paper presents a model for community detection from social graph using the real time data analytic. In this paper, we introduce data analytic algorithms that can analysis contextual data. These algorithms can analyze large scale social interaction data and can detect a community based on the user supplied threshold value for community detection. Experiment result shows that the proposed algorithms can identify expected number meaningful communities from the social graph.

An empirical analysis of the determinants of mobile instant messaging appropriation in university learning

Research on technology adoption often profiles device usability (such as perceived usefulness) and user dispositions (such as perceived ease of use) as the prime determinants of effective technology adoption. Since any process of technology adoption cannot be conceived out of its situated contexts, this paper argues that any pre-occupation with technology acceptance from the perspective of device usability and user dispositions potentially negates enabling contexts that make successful adoption a reality. Contributing to contemporary debates on technology adoption, this study presents flexible mobile learning contexts comprising cost (device cost and communication cost), device capabilities (portability, collaborative capabilities), and learner traits (learner control) as antecedents that enable the sustainable uptake of emerging technologies. To explore the acceptance and capacity of mobile instant messaging systems to improve student performance, the study draws on these antecedents, develops a factor model and empirically tests it on tertiary students at a South African University of Technology. The study involved 223 national diploma and bachelor’s degree students and employed partial least squares for statistical analysis. Overall, the proposed model displayed a good fit with the data and rendered satisfactory explanatory power for students’ acceptance of mobile learning. Findings suggest that device portability, communication cost, collaborative capabilities of device and learner control are the main drivers of flexible learning in mobile environments. Flexible learning context facilitated by learner control was found to have a positive influence on attitude towards mobile learning and exhibited the highest path coefficient of the overall model. The study implication is that educators need to create varied learning opportunities that leverage learner control of learning in mobile learning systems to enhance flexible mobile learning. The study also confirmed the statistical significance of the original Technology Acceptance Model constructs.

Usage of Social Networking Apps Using Smart Phones: A Comparative Study of India and Islamic Republic of Iran

Quest for knowledge is much easier in the present hi-tech world of education, and distance or continuing education is exploring new means and ways of interacting with students and patrons. Education has become much novel by using the Internet and social media in current decade. Smartphone is an important device in the current age that has created different ideas and opportunities for communications. All kinds of applications are in the competition. Instant messaging system has significant influence on long distance communication. This kind of communication has led us to get more familiar with other societies/communities. All types of information and knowledge are shared by social networking websites or applications on smart phones between individuals and public. It just takes less than a second for getting aware and informed about the news or a topic around the world. People of all age groups have free access to their circles via Internet. The aim of this study is to explore how and which type of knowledge Indian and Iranian media students are getting and sharing via smart phones. Telegram messenger is the mostly used application by Iranian while Indian students use WhatsApp. The methodology of this study is both quantitative and qualitative using interview and questionnaire methods.

“Hey there! I am using WhatsApp”: A Preliminary Study of Recurrent Discursive Realisations in a Corpus of WhatsApp Statuses

This paper seeks to contribute to the recent academic study of WhatsApp, the instant messaging (IM) tool that enables people to communicate in a multimodal way mainly via their smartphones and which has impressively become a core form of communication in many social communities (Church & Oliveira, 2013; Sultan, 2014). This study presents research on the most salient discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in WhatsApp statuses, this is, the communicative output of a 139-character blank where WhatsApp users are prompted to write any message in order to complete their profile information.Research on both the discourse of Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) and communicative practices associated to it is vast (Barton & Lee, 2013; Crystal, 2006). Perhaps due to its more established status as communication media, studies in this field have mostly paid attention to the discourse of text messages (Thurlow & Brown, 2003), commonly referred to as textese. More specifically, possibly driven by the apocalyptic and somewhat mediatised visions attributed to the language used in these online communication tools (Thurlow, 2006), academic research has largely aimed to prove the not-so-negative effects of textese in communicative practices and contexts (Tagliamonte & Denis, 2008; Plester et al., 2009; Drouin, 2011). Nonetheless, due to its crucial role in plenty of social communities, research has gradually shed light on the discourse used in IM tools (Baron, 2005; Lee, 2007).The great and rather recent impact of WhatsApp as a form of communication is triggering academic research on the discourse that characterises this IM system. In spite of being remarkably under-researched from a discursive perspective, existing studies explore some language features of WhatsApp (Calero-Vaquera, 2014), making great emphasis on its multimodal character. Far less attention has been devoted however to the discourse of the 139-character blank provided by WhatsApp to allow users update their statuses, even though similar types of communicative outcome has widely been investigated in other systems of online communication, namely Facebook (Garcia & Sikström, 2014; Eisenlauer, 2014).As far as methodology is concerned, the objectives of this study are to examine recurrent discursive realisations and how these are realised from a discursive perspective, to identify the most frequent pragmatic uses and to put forward the possible reasons behind this choice. Thus, this paper analyses a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses randomly selected from the total sample of 523 contacts. Once the final corpus was computerised, a set of tags was designed in order to quantify the most frequent instances. As regards the analytical framework, partly driven by the character of the analysed status, this research relies on contributions in which multimodality is at core of their theoretical underpinnings (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin, 2013).Findings outline the most common discursive realisations and pragmatic uses in a corpus of 400 WhatsApp statuses. Apart from elucidating already existing research on the discourse of WhatsApp, they also demonstrate the centrality of multimodal discourse in this sort of communication (Vincent, 2012) and pave the way for further research within this field of study.

Maintaining patients' social contacts through displaying nonverbal awareness information on mobile devices.

Awareness systems had been invented for supporting groups collaborating simultaneously over a network. They provide each group member with real-time information about the state of affairs on the remote locations of the other members. Awareness systems have also been observed to help remote collaborators develop the same shared sense of community that often emerges within co-located work groups, and this effect of creating or maintaining group cohesion is an important goal in itself. Purely social awareness systems can be employed by any kind of group, e.g. families, without shared work tasks. As a means of preventing loneliness they can be regarded as examples of biomedical technology. In this paper a demonstrator of an awareness-enhanced instant messaging system for elderly living alone is described along with assumptions about group processes that led to its specification.

On the Existence of Subliminal Channel in Instant Messaging Systems

Subliminal channel is a covert communication channel that can securely exchange secret information. By analyzing the communication protocols and encryption algorithms of two popular instant messaging systems QQ and Skype, this paper devotes the efforts to find whether they satisfy the condition of establishing subliminal channel or not. The broad-band subliminal channel can be established in Skype and QQ messages. Therefore, two subliminal channel schemes are proposed to embed and extract subliminal information. Finally, performances of the proposed subliminal channels are compared with those of the ones based on ElGamal digital signature and Newton channel. Experimental results and theoretical analysis show that they are easy to be implemented with large bandwidth and execute fast.

English

2 . ABSTRACT: Nowadays all illegal activities are happened using the communications in instant messages. Present framework for instant messenger have control over suspicious words but not in depth. It means present system could not find out all suspicious words. The proposed system is a framework, which predicts and highlights code words and short form of suspicious words with the help of association rule mining techniques and ontology concepts.Thus this proposed framework detects suspicious messages from instant messaging systems in early stage and helps to identify and predict the type of cyber threat activity and traces the offender details.

Ambidextrous Knowledge Acquisition Using IM: The Role of Social Capital and Interactivity

Although Instant Messaging (IM) systems are considered as a knowledge acquisition and sharing tool in organizations, little empirical research has examined this role of IM. This study investigates ...

Design of an Instant Messaging System Based on the IaaS Cloud Platform

Design of an Instant Messaging System Based on the IaaS Cloud Platform