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Journalism of Courage
If you ever used Yahoo! mail to ask a potential employer to ‘‘evaluate’’ your resume, they might have concluded your grasp of English was insufficient for the job.
Yahoo! Inc. confirmed on Wednesday that its e-mail software has automatically changed certain words — including ‘evaluate’ — in a bid to prevent hackers from spreading viruses.
Although the company declined to list the words its software had been changing, a report on the website News.com says the program changes ‘mocha’ to ‘espresso’, and ‘eval’ to ‘review’.
‘Evaluate’ then becomes ‘reviewuate’, and that job application doesn’t look so polished anymore. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the word-changing program was just one of several practices the company takes to ensure the security of its e-mail.
The problem with words like ‘mocha’, she said, is that along with describing a flavour, it is a command in the Java script computer language, which hackers may intercept.
Aside from a list of e-mail guidelines, which states Yahoo will take measures to insure tight security, the company had not disclosed the word-changing practice to e-mail users.
While some security experts, including Alex Shipp of the e-mail filtering company MessageLabs, said Yahoo’s practice was a tactic to keep its e-mail secure, others said they knew of no other e-mail services changing the text.
A spokeswoman for Microsoft Corporation said its free e-mail service, Hotmail, blocks certain pieces of software code that may be used by hackers, without interfering with any of the actual words contained in the e-mail.
Searches of words like ‘reviewuate’ produce thousands of results on the Internet search engine Google, offering some indication of how often Yahoo’s mail system has replaced words. —(Reuters)
