- BasedApparel.com is a website owned by a person that happens to be the FBI director now. (he owned it before he became the director if it matters)
- The website BasedApparel.com was hacked and the hackers added a malicious click here to verify you are human section that tried to have you download a malicious payload if you were on macos.
All the more reason that those who "serve" in the government should be required to divest of their business interests. The traffic such a site would get due to the tribalism prevalent in US politics makes it a fat target, and potentially a national security threat.
On the other hand... you _do_ have a point here. Care must be taken to make sure that the persons business does not profit by the PR and media exposure related to the position they are taking.
I don't know how to do this. Maybe someone else runs their business at arms length? Maybe tracking the revenue and profit to catch sudden upward swings?
And adding to this, it should of course be completely illegal for politicians, US and other nations, to profit from insider trading.
No state employee would be allowed to run a business like this while employed where I live (sapphire-blue New England state FWIW). Government positions are fairly, but not extravagantly, compensated, prestigious and come with excellent benefits. They should not be an avenue for accumulation of riches. It clearly does not work well and we're not getting the country's best.
I think there should probably be a level at which those requirements kick in, but keep in mind that most of the jobs we're talking about pay around $200k/year, with many of the daily and life expenses included as benefits, pushing the equivalent salary even higher.
It's not like they lose their money or lose the ability to invest their pre-public money. They could sell their business interests, then take the proceeds and put the money into a broad market fund (to prevent company- or industry-specific conflicts of interest). I'd even suggest making them exempt from capital gains should they choose to sell.
Unless of course those with a modicum of competence desire to be true public servants. Read about the character of some of our great leaders like Washington, Lincoln or Eisenhower to understand the mentality of a true public servant. Something someone like Kash Patel knows nothing about.
I don’t think this level of virtue is all that rare, though it is rarely rewarded at the ballot box.
> it would be a target regardless of who owns it currently.
The commonality of attacks makes it more important to eliminate distracting dependencies for critical leaders. Not less.
There is a reason top security clearances have requirements no normal organization could make on their employers. Lack of loose vectors is even more important for leaders.
Did they only target macOS? The article mentions macOS a lot, but AFAIK this attack changes the instructions based on the User-Agent. I've seen the exact page with instructions for Windows and PowerShell before.
This is not normal, other (decent) countries are not like this
> To protect the wiki against automated account creation, we kindly ask you to answer the question that appears below (more info): What is the output of: LC_ALL=C pacman -V|sed -r "s#[0-9]+#$(date -u +%m)#g"|base32|head -1
Wait, they really do that...
Forget about teaching people bad patterns. It's annoying when others assume everyone experiencing something under the same context and considers the same things as them.
Not good to get people into the habit of copying and running code in their terminal.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/kash-patel-fbi-...
You'll feel better in no time.
What is it about Chromium based browsers that this attack narrows down to? Is it something technical in the ease of stealing information or just the imagined market share by the attackers? As per Cloudflare’s statistics browser share on macOS [1], it seems like Google Chrome users are a little less than two thirds of the total user base. But Safari still holds one third of the user base. Ignoring Safari seems like a poor mistake.
[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20...
I don’t think it’s unfair to blame cowardice and venality of individual Republican politicians in the face of being primaried, although it definitely needs an asterisk that we don’t know that the left’s Senators and Congressmen would do any better under the same situation.
we do (and absolutely should) have higher expectations of the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world. said organization that goes after malicious actors makes it even more newsworthy.
