Why Yahoo is messing with your e-mail

One of the oddest stories of the past week concerned Yahoo taking some words from the text of your e-mails and replacing them with other words -- for example, ""mocha" mysteriously changes to "espresso." Even odder, there are hundreds of Web sites that include the word "medireview", which doesn't exist but is a Yahoo-corrupted version of "medieval". Yahoo says all this is to protect against malicious JavaScript exploits. (JavaScript was invented by Netscape as LiveScript; the name was changed when it was gung-ho about Sun's Java.) Other companies manage to filter JavaScript without being quite so dumb about it. CNet and New Scientist reported the story, both crediting our favourite zine NTK (Nasty, British and short) with breaking the story.