Mung / Munge / Obfuscate

Mung (or munge) is computer jargon for "to make repeated changes which individually may be reversible, yet which ultimately result in an unintentional irreversible destruction of large portions of the original item." It was created in 1958 at the Tech Model Railroad Club, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1960, the backronym∞ "Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and a while after that it was revised to "Mung Until No Good" - making it one of the few recursive acronyms.

Mung originally had two main meanings: to make large-scale and irrevocable changes to a file and to destroy something. A person who vandalizes a Wiki page would not be munging that page because the changes could be reversed. In the early text-adventure game Zork, also known as Dungeon, the user could mung an object and thereby destroy it, making it impossible to finish the game if the object was an important item.

The spam epidemics of the 1990s have created a new meaning for mung: to modify an e-mail address so that humans can readily reverse it but robots and address harvesters cannot.

Mung also sometimes stands for Multipurpose Unilateral Nonsense Generator, which is a program that will take web pages and run algorithms on them to make them read as if said in a dialectical manner.
(extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mung∞)

The SpamCopReporting System provides options that include the use of Munging, but noting that some ISPs will not accept munged reports. Also of note, is that the automatic munging is not 100% effective, so if you are concerned that you personal information gets munged, it is important to review the reports before sending them.

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