It seems that January 19, 1986 is considered the day the first PC virus appeared. Every story I've seen about this seems to look back 20 years with a sort of nostalgia. There is nothing good about this, we should be rather ashamed that the problem has gotten substantially worse over the last 20 years.
I'm tempted to put on my tin foil hat and say that the antivirus companies don't want to cure the virus problem as there is a lot of money in pretending to stop viruses. I don't think this is the case though. I believe people have an impression that in order for something to be secure, it also has to be hard. This strikes me as a self fulfilling prophecy. People expect secure things to be hard, so if it's easy to use, it's not secure.
If we look at something like SELinux, it's a technology that does take understanding to setup, but once there is a good policy in place, it will be transparent to the end user. A proper SELinux policy should hinder the effectiveness of malware. Malware will always exist, it should be something rare though, not an ubiquitous part of computing.
