companTech ies team up to combat email scams

• Facebook is teaming up with its tech peers to fight scams.

NEW YORK –  Google, Facebook and other big tech companies are jointly designing a system for combating email scams known as phishing.

Such scams try to trick people into giving away passwords and other personal information by sending emails that look as if they come from a legitimate bank, retailer or other business. When Bank of America customers see emails that appear to come from the bank, they might click on a link that takes them to a fake site mimicking the real Bank of America's. There, they might enter personal details, which scam artists can capture and use for fraud.

To combat that, 15 major technology and financial companies have formed an organization to design a system for authenticating emails from legitimate senders and weeding out fakes. The new system is called DMARC -- short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.

DMARC builds upon existing techniques used to combat spam. Those techniques are designed to verify that an email actually came from the sender in question. The problem is there are multiple approaches for doing that and no standard way of dealing with emails believed to be fake.

The new system addresses that by asking email senders and the companies that provide email services to share information about the email messages they send and receive. In addition to authenticating their legitimate emails using the existing systems, companies can receive alerts from email providers every time their domain name is used in a fake message. They can then ask the email providers to move such messages to spam folder or block them outright.

According to Google, about 15 percent of non-spam messages in Gmail come from domains that are protected by DMARC. This means Gmail users "don't need to worry about spoofed messages from these senders," Adam Dawes, a product manager at Google, said in a blog post.

"With DMARC, large email senders can ensure that the email they send is being recognized by mail providers like Gmail as legitimate, as well as set policies so that mail providers can reject messages that try to spoof the senders' addresses," Dawes wrote.

Work on DMARC started about 18 months ago. Beginning Monday, other companies can sign up with the organization, whether they send emails or provide email services. For email users, the group hopes DMARC will mean fewer fraudulent messages and scams reaching their inbox.

The group's founders are email providers Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc. and Google Inc.; financial service providers Bank of America Corp., Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.'s PayPal; online service companies Facebook, LinkedIn Corp. and American Greetings Corp. and security companies Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path and the Trusted Domain Project.
Google uses it already, both in its email sender and email provider capacities. The heft of the companies that have already signed on to the project certainly helps, and its founders are hoping it will be more broadly adopted to become an industry standard.

Tech and the movies: 3D printing brings new angle to animation

Sony Pictures' upcoming "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" still uses molding clay and traditional stop-motion animation to bring its wide-eyed characters to life, but creator Aardman Animations happily embraced a strange new technology to make those figures speak: 3D printers.

A 3D printer is much like an ordinary one, but it works in a third dimension, depositing a substance that eventually builds up, layer by layer, into an object -- a ball, a model airplane, or an animated critter.

“We built about 8,000 mouths,” key animator Ian Whitlock said, explaining how he brought the various characters to life in an unusually short time. “For the Pirate Captain model, we made 257 separate mouths. For someone like Charles Darwin, we probably had about 130 mouths.”

A 3D printer connects to a computer and receives a file that describes an object in three dimensions, explained Rich Brown, senior editor at cnet.com.

“It works much like a 2D printer,” he said. “The layers build up in liquid form. The material solidifies as it prints out each layer, and the end result is a 3D object in real life.”

The 3D printing of all those different mouths helped speed up the animation process, allowing for more details and characters in the film.

“We’d still be shooting now if we had to sculpt all of these mouths,” Whitlock said. “Even with 3D printing, you can easily spend two to three months on a character. I probably did five or six characters in the space of 10 months.”

The film’s animators broke down the mouth shapes of the characters by listening to an actor’s dialogue. “That would be broken down onto a ‘dope sheet,’ which is a phonetic breakdown,” Whitlock said. “When the directors were happy with the way the mouths looked, then the files would be sent off to a rapid prototype machine, which would then physically print the mouths out.

“When the mouths are printed out, they’re sort of a flesh color. It’s the same technology used to create hearing aides. They have about 14 different skin tones … once it’s done, we sand it and paint it.”

Whitlock said “The Pirates!” is the first animated film to widely embrace 3D printing, although the 2009 film “Coraline” used a similar technique on a smaller scale.

“Using 3D printing technology in animation is brand new to me,” Brown said. “I had no idea they were using 3D printing for a movie. I’m surprised that it turned out to be faster [than traditional animation].”

It’s not just faster, but a tremendous boon, Aardman Animations cofounder and movie director Peter Lord said.

"You can get stronger individual animation styles to each face because of the way that they're made," Lord said. "You retain the style very faithfully, so that's very helpful.”

Animation technology has come a long way since Lord first made a bit of plasticine clay come to life in the ’70s. “My model-making skill was zero, so every character had to have huge feet with big, thick legs in order to stand up right,” he said.

“It was all shot on film with a clockwork camera and the exposure was all over the place. My animation was so bad … and of course there was no playback, so you’d animate all day, and everything that you’d done was hidden in the camera on a roll of film. Then you send it to the lab and keep your fingers crossed.”

Despite all the advances in animation technology, the Aardman team still painstakingly creates the expressions of the characters’ eyes using hand-molded plasticine -- much as Lord did almost 40 years ago.

“The most important thing for the performance is through the eyes,” Whitlock explained. “It meant having a more organic performance, keeping it as clay. It keeps the acting the way we want it.”

“The Pirates! Band of Misfits” is set to be released in theaters on March 30.