If you're using
Yahoo! mail
(which you probably do, if you're reading this!), your incoming
e-mails go through a filter in an attempt to block client-side web scripting attacks.
So, for example,
Yahoo!
changes all the occurrences of
eval (which is a javascript
command) to
review and
mocha (another statement to be used instead of
javascript command) to
espresso.
To test it out: Open your Yahoo! mail account. Compose an e-mail in
HTML format
and type the words
eval and
mocha in the body of your e-mail. Then send it
to yourself. Now, open the received e-mail in your mailbox, you'll be surprised to see
the result.
At some point (which we're not really sure when) Yahoo! programmers compiled a
list of those dangerous
scripting words and applied and replace method on them. The equivalents
have been chosen so lamely that if you
look for the word medireview on Google,
you'll find a lot of results!!
Medireview is the replacement of
medieval,
created in the process of changing
eval to review and is used after
being pasted into university papers, book reviews, Indian newspapers and
endless enthusiast sites drop it "unseen" into texts. Now, it's time to push
the first filter-made word into the Oxford Dictionary!
This incident has been reported over a year ago, are they really willing to
change their codes and change the eval to
ev@l or something like that or
we'll see more occurrences of medireview on the web (and in the books)?
Another report of an actual mangled e-mail address:
> Someone [...] changed his e-mail address to "cheval" and several of us
couldn't get his new address straight because it kept coming up at
"chreview". Eventually, we realized what the word actually was, but it
took a while..
Thanks to my friend Tekno for brining that up.
Related story from Need to Know..
A friendly reminder: Be careful if you're sending this article to a
Yahoo! mailbox!! :-)
