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I Feel So NOT Violated- Thank You, Policies ;-)

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Ever wondered how those crafty IT support admins lock you out of all that you know Windows can offer you? All of the fun stuff! Well, this blog will walk you through the basics so you can apply the same maniacal tactics to your home system, or take this back to your office.  What kind of policies exists in Windows? There are two types of policies that can be modified by an administrator. Local Security -  these are policies that impact how the system itself is structured for user interactions. (i.e. a user, not an administrator, can be restricted from performing an activity like shutting down the computer) Group - These policies look at how to restrict the users versus how the system responds to users.  If you are thinking about Active Directory, yes Group policies are applied in AD, but we have not gotten there yet. We will cover AD in future posts.  Setting up a Local Security Policy Log into your windows machine, and open Local Security Policy Manager by searchi...
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Writing a Powershell Script

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I'm not even going to try and re-write any of the wonderful articles out on the web, but I will make suggestions on where you can find great practice materials to practice reading PowerShell.  I believe that reading scripts and code is the best way to find the really cool stuff about a language. Scripting /coding is an art form more than a science because there is no one way to skin a cat. By reading code written by other people, you start to learn techniques and develop questions about how something works. More often than not you will spend a lot of time asking, why the idiot did it that way. That is until you finish the entire script and realize how genius the code actually is.  One final thing before you hop on over to this article to find your first PowerShell script exercise. To make the most out of this exercise you will need to first learn how to start a service as another user. follow the steps laid out below.  The following steps were performed on Powershell 5.1....
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PowerShell Starter

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 PowerShell is seriously for Everyone I'll be honest with you all, I know enough PowerShell to get out of trouble. On the other hand, writing these blogs have really gotten me excited about how useful PowerShell can be. I have even installed PowerShell onto my Linux machine. Yes! you heard that right, PowerShell runs on more than just Windows. In fact, Microsoft has articles on how to install PowerShell on Linux and Mac OS.  The Power... in Powershell I have learned that the most beautiful part about Powershell is its structure. PowerShell is comprised of commands called command-let(s), and every command-let follows the same structure Verb - Noun. This makes it easier for people to remember or even guess at a new command-let. The other winning attribute of PowerShell is that it is built around objects.  Object-oriented languages are really cool in that coding because focused on targets of interest, and each target has attributes that make it similar to another object of t...
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Working with Windows Passwords

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Don't you just hate it when you create the world's most complicated password for your admin account, and then "Bing!, Bang!, Boom!" it is gone from your memory like a thief in the night? Yeah, that has never happened to me either 😉 To be honest with you, what this post is going to show you is not even close to the proper methods a real admin would use to establish a password recovery methodology. This blog posting is purely for the fun factor. If you are looking to sharpen your Windows admin skills needed for work, check out this article on 3 ways to actually recover an admin password ( https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-ways-to-reset-the-forgotten-windows-administrator-password/ ).  Note : Just in case you were wondering, the only password worth learning to recover is the admin password because all other passwords can be reset by an admin.  Ok so if you are still here and reading, you are just looking to learn how mischievous little children can ransack a computer by s...
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