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A not so new kind of scam – email spoof

So, the following arrived in my inbox today, allegedly sent from me, to me.

Email spoof scam

Further down in that longwinded text, they demand a payment in Bitcoin to release my email domain from the hack. I immediately checked the header to see whether my account has indeed been hacked. Of course it hasn’t, they just spoofed my email address, quite elaborately I might add.

Google has a pretty nifty tool to analyze email headers, so that you don’t have to wade through a bunch of code. You simply copy the header in its entirety, as shown below, and let Google do the analysis.

Header analysis

Here’s the result:
Header analysis result
 

 

The originating IP address, 103.35.109.142, is apparently in Bangladesh, in the Dhaka region, as one can find out via https://www.iplocation.net, for example.

I sent a complaint to the original service provider to report the abuse. Let’s see what happens.

Handouts for ATA59 – An Introduction to Neural Machine Translation

I will be giving another presentation at the upcoming ATA Annual Conference in New Orleans, ATA59, jointly in the SciTech and Language Technology tracks. The presentation will give an introduction to neural machine translation. My talk is preliminarily scheduled for the very last time slot on Saturday before the final keynote. I hope to see you there, despite the late hour!

Abstract

“The end of the human translator,” “nearly indistinguishable from human translation” – these and similar headlines have been used to describe neural machine translation (NMT). Most language specialists have probably asked themselves: How much of that is hype? How far can this approach to machine translation really go? How does it work? The presentation will examine one of the available open source NMT toolkits as an illustrative example to explain the underlying concepts of NMT and sequence-to-sequence models. It will follow in the same spirit as last year’s general introduction to neural networks, which is summarized in the accompanying handouts.

Handouts

I have just uploaded the handout for the presentation onto the ATA server. The material is a slightly updated version of my blog post on neural networks, which summarizes my presentation at ATA58. You can download the handout here.

Workshop: How to Create a Professional Website with WordPress

I recently presented this workshop on website creation with WordPress, which was organized by the Northern California Translators Association.

Summary:

Themes, posts, pages, widgets, plug-ins, SQL databases, SSL, … oh my! In this workshop, you will not only learn what these terms mean, you will learn how to build a professional, responsive website from scratch with WordPress, one of the most popular solutions for this task. Attendees can follow along on their computers and optionally create their own (free, with limitations) site on WordPress.com.

Prerequisites: While no experience with WordPress or website programming and design knowledge is required, attendees should have some basic familiarity with computers and their setup. Those who want to follow along with their devices and start building their site during the workshop (optional), should bring a device with internet connectivity, an installed browser, and a keyboard (tablets will probably work, too).

The slides for the first part of the workshop are available here.