BrightTALK the obnoxious spammer

By | July 3, 2024
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BrightTALK is a shit organization that is supposed to be a media company providing technology webinars you can watch. The problem is they are one of the most obnoxious spammers on the planet. If your email addresse gets on one of their lists, you are screwed! Their unsubscribe options do not work and seem to actually sign you up for more SPAM from them. The only way to deal with them is to reject their email and protect everyone in your organization. I do this by creating a rule in Exchange online.

I highly recommend everyone to add this rule to their mail server settings. After an hour of creating this rule, I have already blocked over a dozen emails from these bastards.

Hide installed application in Windows

By | May 17, 2024
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There may be a time when you need to hide an installed application so that it will not be uninstalled. An easy way to keep an application from being uninstalled is to just hide it from appearing in Windows add/remove programs. This is easily achieved by adding the SystemComponent value DWORD in the uninstall section of the registry for that specific application.

Let’s say I want to hide the Zoom application from appearing in Windows. Currently, you can see it listed in the control panel

I can run the following powershell command to add the SystemComponent entry to the registry and set the value to 1 to hide the application:

New-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{57D6B477-1B0C-4C4B-8479-A89ACFDFD875}' -Name SystemComponent -Value 1

Now the application will no longer appear in the installed Applications section of Control panel.

To make the item visible again, just delete the SystemComponent from the registry.

Powershell .ToString()

By | April 22, 2024
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I’m posting this as I spent too much time on figuring out how to convert the current IP of a machine and turn the IP address into an array. I needed this so I can change the last octet to a couple of other values that I would set later in the script. Powershell has an odd way of outputting data into different types such as objects. Objects can be frustrating when you just want a string output, but objects do give you all types of other possible information from the data you are querying.

The output of my variable $ipv4 is an object.

I mean there is quite a bit of data to choose from, but I just wanted the IP address. So, after digging around, I realized I needed to pass a PSObject .ToString() to my variable which will return the string representation for this object.

Finally! My variable only outputting the string value.

Now that I can get the actual string value I need, I can then use split(‘.’) to split the string at each period character to an array. For some reason, getting just the string value on this one stumped me longer than it should have. So, here it is for anyone that ever needs this (Or myself for future reference). Splitting your IP address into an array.

$ipV4 = (Test-Connection -ComputerName (hostname) -Count 1).IPV4Address
$ipArray =  ($ipV4.ToString()).Split(".")

Write-Host("IPV4 Output :" + $ipV4)
Write-Host("Octect1 [0] :" + $ipArray[0])
Write-Host("Octect2 [1] :" + $ipArray[1])
Write-Host("Octect3 [2] :" + $ipArray[2])
Write-Host("Octect4 [3] :" + $ipArray[3])