John Gruber explains why the recent Dan Goodin “story” about the “rise of OS X malware” is, well, bullshit. It was an AP piece, so it ran all over the damn place despite being a poorly researched piece of shit, as Gruber illustrates. Bullets, in case you’re in a hurry:

• Yes, if you’re an idiot, and download supposedly unreleased OS updates from dodgy websites and try to install them, the odds are you’ll get infected. Dumbass.
• No, we’re not invulnerable in Macland. But no reasonable person every said we were.
• Yes, it’s still true that the Mac is essentially virus-free, and has been since its introduction.
• Yes, this is partly because of its market share, but also because of the way the system is designed since the shift to OS X.
• No, Apple’s move to the Intel platform does not mean it’s going to be subject to an increased level of malware activity — virii are still system dependent; you’ll note that Linux is virus-free, too, but has always run on the same hardware as Windows.
• Finally, journalists sure are lazy:

  If Goodin wanted to be reasonable or accurate, he could have written a story titled “Some Guy Double-Clicked a Trojan Horse Virus for Mac OS X but It Didn’t Actually Spread to Anyone Else”, but what kind of story would that be? OK, it’d be a true story, but it wouldn’t be a good story. No one would have linked to such a story except to make fun of it: What would be the point of making a big stink out of one guy who got hit by a Mac OS X Trojan horse — which was so poorly written that it couldn’t even successfully spread to another computer — when there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Windows users suffering from malware every single day? What good journalism calls for is taking that one guy, and writing an article that presents his episode as though it were part of a trend of increasing Mac virus attacks. No one is going to make fun of Dan Goodin — or the Associated Press, or the dozens of reputable news outlets that ran the story — for that.