Eh, it also excludes people that don't have spectacular long-term memory, or people that don't keep a diary about bugs that they've chased down at work. Personally, I think you're overfitting to fight cheating, but maybe you work at a desirable enough place that you can afford to exclude so many people but still get enough good candidates.
IMO a good question provides the necessary context itself, and the candidate's thinking and reasoning skills are what's tested. With your question, it's basically turned into a competition of which candidate has tackled the most ridiculous/obscure/complex bug, so candidates aren't being judged on even footing.
Agreed completely. This problem borders on that common category of questions which test whether the applicant shares a specific fine-grained flavor of nerdiness as the interviewer, rather than whether the candidate is a good fit for the job.
IMO a good question provides the necessary context itself, and the candidate's thinking and reasoning skills are what's tested. With your question, it's basically turned into a competition of which candidate has tackled the most ridiculous/obscure/complex bug, so candidates aren't being judged on even footing.