The Eggplant and I

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 24, 2004

Quick: How many people out there like the color purple. I mean, really, really like it?

Okay, but would you (if a woman) wear, say, a purple polyester pantsuit, or (if a man) a purple double breasted tuxedo?

I thought so. Now what about furniture? Would you buy a purple colored sofa? Dining room chair? Kitchen table?

See, I have nothing against purple, per se. But I feel I must share with you an important secret that I have been hiding for too long. You see, purple is nice enough, but nobody in their right mind would even think of furnishing their house in purple, let alone being seen in public wearing clothes woven in the color.

Even nature is no fan of purple. Yes, there are those mountains in America that the song says have a purple majesty, but that's just poetic license. Mountains are colored in shades of brown – we certainly have enough of them around here to know! You've heard of purple sunsets, but those are actually more like wine colored. And crocuses are more properly thought of as violet, which is close, but not quite purple.

My friends, there is only one purple item commonly found in our homes, kitchens and gardens. That purple item is – the eggplant. And the eggplant is a bad, bad vegetable.

I want to be clear here: I am not a crackpot. I am not going to claim something as silly as the eggplant being a vast rightwing conspiracy or an alien plot to take over earth. Which it could be. But I unfortunately cannot provide evidence of this.

Nevertheless, I know the eggplant is a troublemaker by the company it keeps. Forget the fact that it's purple, has alien looking spores inside, and is extremely oily. The name itself should be all the evidence we need. Egg plant? What happened to the chicken? Talk about unnatural crossbreeding!

But the way I really know that eggplants are to be avoided is because of a series of anonymous e-mails I have been receiving. Somehow, the vast eggplant lobby has gotten wind of my dislike of their weird mind-controlling - I mean, of their possibly innocuous off color - vegetable, and has been trying to prevent me from exposing them. It started out with friendly persuasion: I got an offer for a free sample tub of a new eggplant and techina spread. I wrote back, saying that I did not like eggplants, or spam, for that matter, but they just kept trying, sending me even more vociferous and demanding messages. Each time I responded, and each time I told them I was becoming more convinced of the danger of this "plant," if that's what it really is.

But they wouldn’t stop. I got letters from someone who calls himself a marketing director, who wrote me (and I quote) "we intend to make it our mission to convince you to try [product name deleted], which combines the natural goodness of eggplant into a delicious, nutritious dish, suitable for a snack or a whole meal!"

But that wasn't all. These eggplant "people" – if that's what they really are – have threatened to destroy my brain if I don't play ball with them. Here's an excerpt from another message: "Research on eggplant has focused on an anthocyanin phytonutrient found in eggplant skin called nasunin. Nasunin is a potent antioxidant and free radical scavenger that has been shown to protect brain cell membranes from damage." In other words, if I don’t play ball with their eggplant agenda, they are going to fry my brain.

Am I the only one who sees this? I go to the market and I see cartons upon cartons of these unearthly purple monstrosities being gobbled up by an unsuspecting public. I try to warn them – but instead of thanks, I get tossed out of the store on my behind by the store "manager," who is obviously in on the whole thing. Whatever happened to freedom of speech? It's happened too many times in too many stores to be a coincidence. This thing is definitely big.

And I know what's coming next: They are, without question, going to try and brainwash me via my computer. It makes sense: They've been sending me all these e-mails, right? So it stands to reason that they are going to send me some type of subliminal program that will get me to shut up.

But I'm one step ahead of them. You see, any brainwashing application they try to install in my computer can only come surreptitiously; I could be surfing on a purple colored Web page and they could automatically install their application! That’s why I downloaded and installed Prevx, a fantastic program that will ward off "drive by downloads," file system and registry attacks, "buffer overflows," and all sorts of other ikky alien plots (or hacker plots, for that matter) that anti-virus programs and even firewalls don’t stand a chance against.

It seems nowadays that "they" are manufacturing sophisticated methods of getting into your computer and hijacking it for whatever purpose. As soon as a new exploit is created, of course, the anti-virus companies and firewall makers rush to come up with a fix, which will hopefully keep the big bad wolf at bay until Microsoft comes up with another patch to fix what was obviously a hole in the system.

But how do the powers that be know that there is a problem? Simple: when there is a critical mass of complaints coming in from their clients. Because there are so many ways to invade Windows, those who are on guard against attacks can't do anything until some people – and sometimes, many people – get burned.

The whole virus and hacker fighting system is built on reaction, not pro-action; you get defended after you download the latest profile. Until then, your computer is ripe for the picking.

These initial incidents – the ones that go towards developing a solution – are called "Zero Day Attacks," and if you are the victim of one, you are out of luck. Your computer, of course, will die a heroic death, and you can be proud that your PC's sacrifice will go to save the lives of many others. But bravery be damned; you need to look out for your own interests, and relying on the sacrifices of other users is not just unreliable, it's downright morbid, as far as I am concerned.

Prevx has a completely different approach – one that could be compared to the approach of a lock down maximum security prison. Prevx calls itself an Intrusion Prevention package that will search for "bad behavior" on your system – preventing trouble from happening by preventing agents of destruction, whether they come in the form of executable files, buffer overruns (where a Web site, for example, will send your computer so much data that it eats up all your RAM and eventually crashes), spyware and popup windows, or ActiveX exploits, from taking any actions without your permission.

Prevx is certainly on the ball – some might even say paranoid. You can set the level of protection, and if you choose "maximum," the program will report any change in your system's registry, installed program base, new application entering memory, unzipped files, etc. If you try and install a program with Prevx running, you will find yourself clicking on a lot of permission changes (Prevx itself recommends you turn it off when installing software).

But even a program like Prevx is geared to identifying specific threats. What if some new, nefarious nano-virus is developed in the future – one that doesn’t set off the same alarms that current methods do? Don’t worry; Prevx will be able to take care of future threats too. Any time your system changes without permission – i.e., you were hacked or got a virus that Prevx didn’t catch – it "phones home" and contacts a database, and uploads details of the attack – and the treatment for those newly discovered problems will be incorporated in the next edition of Prevx. Although this sounds like what virus companies do, keep in mind that a virus could infect hundreds of thousands of computers before the fix come out; based on the way Prexv defends your computer, the likelihood of a new exploit that the program does not catch is quite low. If you prefer not to have Prevx contact the database, by the way, you can turn the option off.

Note that Prevx does not come to replace anti-virus and firewall software; all three systems can run in tandem, and Prevx won’t root out viruses or spyware already on your computer. But with Prevx, it's likely that an alien exploit will never again implant itself in your computer again – or an alien vegetable, for that matter.

ds@newzgeek.com