Ron Bowes

@iagox86.bsky.social

3343 Followers 778 Following

Staff Product Detection Engineer @ Censys. https://skullsecurity.org Mostly post about professional stuff, maybe some improv stuff and maybe even magic some day. Seattle-based (originally Canadian), queer, cybersecurity nerd. (He/him)

"Unfortunately, today's puzzle continued the New York Times' continued love affair with transphonic hate-monger JK Rowling at 27D. They just will not stop with the Harry Potter references. This woman is a bigoted monster, and by continuing to promote her work, they are implicitly endorsing her disgusting views. It shouldn't be this hard for adults to give up a children's book when its creator is using every cent of the profit from it to attack an already marginalized community."

Yes, this looks AI generated. Tells:
His right hand (image left) has fused/malformed fingers, and the left hand's grip on the handlebar looks anatomically off.
The bike geometry doesn't fully make sense - the frame and pedal/crank area have slightly inconsistent proportions, and the chain area is smudged rather than mechanically coherent.
Overall texture is that telltale "fake film grain" look - the grain and vignette are uniform in a way that doesn't match how real 35mm grain and lens vignetting behave together.
Background elements (fence pickets, tree branches) get slightly mushy and lose structure the further they are from the subject, typical of diffusion models prioritizing the focal subject.
The meme text styling and framing is consistent with the current wave of "nostalgic AI photo" memes that circulate on X/Facebook/Bsky.
None of these are individually definitive, but together they're a strong pattern.

Claude after being told to downsize it, "Yes. Downscaling the original (e.g. to ~130px wide with Lanczos resampling) collapses the outlined gibberish font into "THANKS FOR CHECKING OUT DECOY FONT" — I actually generated this in my last message (small_0.1.png, lz_150.png, etc.) but misread my own output and wrongly concluded there was no hidden text. That was a mistake on my part.
Mechanism: the font is designed so each glyph's outline is a distinct shape at full resolution (reads as gibberish), but the outline widths/spacing are tuned so that when Lanczos-downsampled, the strokes blur together into the actual letterforms of a different, legible message."

Major-General Jihad al-Jabiri of the Interior Ministry's General Directorate for Combating Explosives has defended the device: "Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs. I don't care what they say. I know more about bombs than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Screenshot of article text: "The sources briefed on the investigation said Iran’s history of targeting the gas tank systems is one reason the country is a top suspect. But, the sources cautioned, the US government may not be able to definitively determine who was responsible because of a lack of forensic evidence left by the hackers."

Four chickens in a coop wondering what this idiot on a bike wants

Bike ride - $20.76

Marriott Bonvoy unsubscribe page with an error on it (and my email address revealed, please don't spam :) )

A sketchy text inviting me to click a link to "promise pay" to pay my overdue bill

A Duolingo treasure chest that you have to tap for some sorta useless currency

Jellyfin and Obsidian icons

Duolingo pop-up saying that my "Super Family preview" expired

Gabriella Lester and her volunteer

Michael Goudeau eating a tomato while juggling

Michael Goudeau juggling tomatoes

Matt shrink-wrapped

Lindsay Benner juggling knives

Rock Opera improv

A "time's up!" dialog over a video that, I assure you, was still playing

A trump puppet with a crown on stage with Gwar (Winnipeg 2017)

Sharp - our green cheek conure - wrapped in a towel

Email from Instagram: "

We disabled your account, theymightbeghosts

Hi theymightbeghosts,
We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Standards. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled.

Learn how our Community Standards help keep the Instagram community an authentic and respectful place for people to express themselves."

A green cheek conure (named Sharp) (American Dilute colors) chewing my microphone

An Akamai abuse report for hosting "boot32drv.sys", associated with the Flame malware from the dark ages

"We would be shocked if a vendor tried to sweep a vulnerability this serious under a rug, and knowingly give their customers a misplaced sense of security.

Regardless, we applied for a CVE number ourselves and were allocated CVE-2024-48248, so we can at least reference the vulnerability by this name."

Questions from my citizenship exam, the first one being: "What is the rule of law? (no one, including the president, is above the law)"

$Two commands: The first one, which fails: $ echo -ne 'HEAD / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | ncat -v 127.0.0.1 4080 The second one, which works: $ echo -ne 'HEAD / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | ncat -v --no-shutdown 127.0.0.1 4080$

An exploit body containing placeholders such as {{csrf}} and {{randstr}} (instead of actually generating values)

Starting a Metasploit handler on port 60103

A screenshot of an HTTP request that wgets malware over port 59142

A news story from today:

Headline: Threat Actors Using Ephemeral Port 60102 for Covert Malware Communications

Recent cybersecurity investigations have uncovered a sophisticated technique employed by threat actors to evade detection during malware distribution.

Attackers are leveraging ephemeral port 60102, typically reserved for temporary communications, as a service port for covert malware transmission.

This approach bypasses traditional monitoring systems, which often focus on scanning standard service ports such as 80 or 443.

A statement from Newsmax on the Trump administration's barring of The Associated Press. Newsmax was one of dozens of media orgs that signed a letter to the White House in support of The Α.Ρ

Manpage for strncpy with the text highlighted:

These functions copy non-null bytes from the string pointed to by src into the array pointed to by dst. If the source has too few non-null bytes to fill the destination, the functions pad the destination with trailing null bytes.

Seasonal drink menu at a coffee shop including the "Laura Dern"

Two green cheek conures, one of whom is looking for a nest in my bookshelf

$Using the syntax "\\?\c:\" to create a file called COM1$

Photograph of a book: "Pleasuring yourself on stage is not only the secret to impro- vising. It's also the only reason to do it in the first place. Look, there's precious little money to be made in improv, so you'd better invent your own payoff every time you step on stage."

A Duolingo pay-extra level disguised with the other levels

Screenshot of Bluesky from "I should write a bittorrrent client" immediately to "I've done it"

A note with the text, "discretely gather as much information about others as possible"

"People who are not careful with passwords, such as use of pet’s names or favorite sports teams as their password for everything, are even more vulnerable to an evil twin attack. Alcorn says for individuals who reuse username and password combinations online, once the credentials are obtained they can be fed into AI, where its power can quickly give cybercriminals the key."

Several exploit attempts that start with "ram=watchTowr" followed by a backtick (command injection) and a Curl request

Me sitting in a chair during an improv scene

Order for Windows Security Internals

"More than 20% of Rapid7 incident response cases in 2024 so far have involved Veeam being accessed or exploited in some manner, typically once an adversary has already established a foothold in the target environment."

Glenn's full name does, indeed, say (OOO)

Screenshot of Glenn's status, where he did not follow his own suggestion!

Compatible browsers are iOS and desktop

"Current browser not supported"

Suspicious email from timothybrandon750@gmail.com to ron-livenation saying:

Hello Ron Bowes.
It is our mission to ensure that you are satisfied with your order. We
have assigned invoice - REDACTED to your current order so that we
can communicate with you promptly and productively. Whenever you
contact us with this reference ID, we will be able to help you with
your needs immediately.

Green parrot hanging down from a feeding toy

My small green conure stretching her little dinosaur neck to chew the book I'm reading

Quote from the article: "A man wanted just two slices of cheese on his sandwich, so when his wife used three slices in his grilled cheese sandwich, he became irate.

Angered at the sight of all the extra cheesiness, James DePaola became agitated and violent, yelling at the woman, Michele DePaola. According to WSB-TV, DePaola then ripped the landline out of the wall so his wife couldn’t call the police and reportedly screamed at her intensely. The couple’s 12-year old daughter who witnessed the incident called the police to the scene, according to Athens-Clarke County police."

A screenshot of the references section of a CVE page with a Bugtraq link underlined

Snow out my window

A FAQ entry for Ivanti on CVE-2023-39336:

Question: When did you discover this vulnerability?

Answer: An outside Security Researcher informed us that they had discovered a potential issue in late October 2023.

Screenshot of Penn & Teller Fool Us, with me sitting behind Penn & Teller

OneDrive's "backup" nag screen that can be snoozed for 1 week or 30 days, but no option to go away forever

A snippet from the FAQ on Ivanti EPMM's site:

> How do I know if I’ve been breached?
> Ivanti has prepared an “Analysis Guidance” document that can be shared upon request. Customers should open a ticket with support to obtain a copy of this document. This guide will be shared under the applicable current NDA or controlling confidentiality terms found in the end user license and services agreement found here.