July 15, 2002

What does "medireview" mean? Apparently Yahoo Mail quietly changes all instances of "eval" in HTML messages and attachments to "review," and makes similar substitutions for other words that also correspond to Javascript commands. And apparently many people copy text from Yahoo Mail to other places without noticing the substitutions made by Yahoo. As a result there now are thousands of published articles, reports, CVs, web pages, and other documents that use words like "medireview," "reviewuation", "Chreviewier," "prreviewent," and "retrireview." (See RISKS Digest (11 April 2001), NTKnow (12 July 2002), New Scientist, and this list of Yahoo's word substitutions.)

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