“All, right, I’m sick of people reporting that Mac OS X is ‘mostly’ virus-free. It is, as far has been proven, ENTIRELY virus-free. Macs are not magical, and one day there will be virus that infects them. However, I don’t think it’s happened yet, and I think it’s time we, the Mac community, started saying, ‘No, we don’t have any viruses,” Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster fame writes in his blog “Call Me Fishmeal.”
“Let me be clear: not having had a virus is NOT the same as being immune to viruses. I think part of the reason almost nobody has been willing to stand up on this crusade has been that we get shouted down with cries of, ‘Well, no OS is perfect; Mac OS X will get its virus!’ And I have no doubt we will. But Windows gets a virus every freaking week, and we’ve never had ONE. I think that’s also relevant,” Shipley writes.
“I’ll admit, others have come up with the idea of offering a bounty for Mac OS X viruses before, but I think those plans failed due to the way the challenge was structured. I don’t want to incite someone to create the first Mac OS X virus,” Shipley writes. “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. The definition of ‘virus’ will for this contest will be either a virus or worm as described by the wikipedia. The challenge ends at 23:59:00, October 16, 2005.”
Shipley writes, “I will only offer this bounty once, and as you can see, the deadline for the viruses to have done their dirty work is in the past. So, if you’re planning to write a new virus just to win the challenge, well… that won’t work unless you also make a time machine. (Which, frankly, I’d be willing to fund for $500.) This is a research project, not a programming project: find one of us who has been infected at some time, and tell the world about it.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As regular readers know, we call writers on their descriptions of Mac OS X as “mostly virus-free” whenever we see it happening. Mac OS X to date has had no (zero) known viruses.
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