Project Plan

Concept

- Sudden death ---> not enough time to record your message
- Speech that hard to speak out
- share thoughts with the world
- message to represent yourself

Implementation

3 stages:
1: Data collection
2: Data Visualisation
3: Application:
storing lastwords to be sent to recipients if users failed to survive.

Content for users

Upload a custom profile picture as the portrait of the deceased
Read the term of use and and understand the use of collected data
Personal info: Nickname, Gender, phone no. and phone passcode/account information
Contact list + emergencey contact *
Action list *
Ask the user to tell this app/web to their emergencey contact

optional *

Schedule

1 week develop front-end + database (html + MySQL)
2 weeks collect data (social media) + develop website to visualisation

Similar & related works

- lastwords.rip
- MyWill (on App Store)
- Jsut Code

RISK AREAS

Tasks must be done:

PHP for sending emails and communication between server and database
HTML form for users fill in information

Potential problem to the project:

How will you keep the data secure (and backed up, replicated)?
I have a trusted friend that studied Information Engineering, I will ask him to hack my database later. If the data need to be backed-up, should I transfer the data from one platform to another, say MySQL to MongoDB?
What is the mechanism for notifying contact-list or family after death?
This is done by automatic sending email function, I is a PHP running continuously, if it matched certain condition, e.g. the date to give sign of surviving has expired for a long time, it will send email by itself.
What happens if you move and forget to update your data (new phone, new email, etc)?
The user may not be able to log in to the system.
How will you avoid making family/friends upset for a ‘false’ notification?
How does the project 'finish’ (what happens to the data when you move on to other projects, or stop using technology, or even die)?
This is the same as all traces we left online, they are inherited forever. But if I need to define an end to the site/project, it will be the time I abandon the hosting of the website. Maybe someday I am not interested in it, or there are some advanced technology that can totally substitute this app. The data will always be kept, as users agreed that. But I should not use them in other purposes.
How is this different from https://lastwords.rip
Lastwords.rip is a site that functions good. But I wanted to create the project more close to the community. I want the web/app run like social media, if it is possible, it should work with existing social media app extension. For now, the site should looks like a project, more like an art piece while reflex the need for people to leave messages. It should support multiple languages.

Documentation

Funeral Agency, Jason Wong (2022)

Screenshots

Description

The Funeral Agency is an online platform to store last words. Currently, The login system works fine, users can create accounts and communicate with the database to leave messages and edit their info. I planned to make an online cemetery, but apparently, I spent too much time building a secure login system, and I failed to finish it on time. Luckily the login system is working fine, which I think is a good start for building a functioning system later.

Process

I bought a domain name and open a subdomain under it. All the files are transferred to the server through SFTP(fileZilla).
Most pages of the site are written in .PHP file. It is because PHP is a backend language for the browser to communicate with the server. PHP can handle both backend and frontend(HTML) code, while HTML file can only handle frontend static lines.
All the functions to communicate with database were located in the Admin_Functions.php.
The Admin_Functions.php is a php that contains private information for connecting to database, therefore, the files in the private folder can only be executed, it cannot be read or write by all public users.

Toolkit

php
html
database: phpMyAdmin
Visual Studio Code
FileZilla
DNS
regex
One-way Encryption
object-class
bootstrap CSS
javascript & DOM events
(JSON)

How-to-Use Demo video

Link to source code

Github

Link to project

https://www.jasonsart.info/projects/rip

Difficulties

I haven't learned a lot about PHP and SQL databases before. Therefore, I have to learn this new language from scratch.
I also spent a lot of time learning Bootstrap, to better layout a responsive HTML in order to perform on different devices.

Things that are planned but not finished and how I will implement them:

Upload image system: I was using a method to insert an image to the database. As images can be handled by PHP and stored as BLOB datatype in the database table. The BLOB type encodes the image into unreadable letters. If the image is extracted from the database, it will return a .bin file. It is possible to convert the bin into an image again in the frontend display, but it takes a lot of time and processing power. Another method is to store the image file elsewhere in the repository and link to the source when needed. But this exposes a security problem. The others can guess the URL and go to the file directly. Therefore, I think I need to encrypt the filename before uploading it to the folder.
Forget password: I have included two documents in the repository for resetting the password, but I found that it is not secure enough. The method I planned to use is to set a new password and send it to the user through an email. But what if the email was abandoned by the user or the email is also hacked by someone. So now, I have come up with 2 solutions. First, I will generate a one time password and a expire time in the database when a email is submitted to request for resetting his/her password. If the one time passcode matched with the database within the time, it will allow the user to set the password. The second solution is to generate a link and send to user's email. The link will redirect to a reset page with $_GET input of a unique text string. The reset password can be validated through the URL.

Future Development:

When I was working with the database, I realised that I am not going to prevent the database from hackers. I just need to avoid the data being used by hackers. Later, I will think of using AES to encrypt the data, set a specific key to decrypt each column in the tables and store the keys in other databases.
The database is now exposed to hackers' attacks. hackers are able to view and alter information in the database through SQL injection. I am learning about SQL injection and how to avoid it.
I will start work on the mailing system soon.