You go, Wil!

Wil Shipley (a funny and bright Mac developer who's been featured on this site before) is sick and tired of folks claiming that MacOS X is only "mostly virus-free," as if infection was just a matter of time and market-share.

Seriously, if a reporter asked you, "Hey, do you have herpes?" and you replied, "Nope, I've been tested, no herpes, never," and then they wrote an article with the headline, "Bob Smith: Mostly Herpes-Free," you would, no doubt, flip (assuming your name was Bob Smith).

To that end, he's proposing the idea of offering a bounty for the first person to find an actual, exploited, non-hypothetical Mac OS X virus that's already out in the wild -- because barring such a beastie, the correct statement is "MacOS X is completely virus-free." As in zilch, zero, nada, less than 0.000000001, etc.

So, here's my plan. I'm not putting it into effect yet, but I'm soliciting comments, and if nobody can prove it's a bone-headed idea, I'll go ahead with it.

I'm going to offer a bounty of $500 to the first person who can prove that a Mac running Mac OS X (version 10.0 or greater, and patched to the latest security level available at the time from Apple) was accidentally and detrimentally infected with a virus that exploited a flaw in the base Mac OS X installation (not, say, Microsoft Word) before September 20, 2005.

Yeah, $500 might not be much of a prize, but considering that all you need to do to claim it is to find a virus, it should be easy money if MacOS X is really as insecure as the self-proclaimed techno-pundits claim it is, right?