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Showing posts from October, 2015

Calculating Bitwise Values

In the last post , I went into a bit of what bitwise AND does, looked at the binary equivalent of the userAccountControl (UAC) value, and showed some visual examples of how calculations are done to find the applied flags. In this post, I thought I’d go through exactly how you do this. So first off, dust off your calculator and get into Programmer mode. Since Windows 10 has a beautiful calculator, I’ll be doing my demonstration on that.   CONVERTING INTEGERS TO BINARY IN CALCULATOR You’ll cry when you see how easy this is. Make sure your calculator is set to DEC. Type in your value. Observe the BIN value. Done! When I copy and paste out of the calculator, I get ‭00010000001000000000‬.   HOW ABOUT POWERSHELL? Well, sure. In this case, we can use the [convert] class to switch the value to base2 format. Check it out: [Convert]::ToString(66048, 2) This outputs the exact binary value I had before with the leading zeroes stripped off -- 10000001000000000. Note all I did was a

My Feeble Understanding of Bitwise

I thought I would set the record straight that by posting something about bitwise does not make me an authority. It doesn’t even make me mildly educated about the concept. In fact, if you have been with me since the beginning, you will know the intention of my blog to create posts that would serve as reminders of how I did something previously -- or interesting stuff that I might have found. With that meager attempt at excusing my ignorance, let’s talk bitwise. In my last post , I mentioned deciphering userAccountControl (UAC). As an aside, this bitwise stuff isn’t just AD. You can find it in other things like ConfigMgr for example. Remember advertFlags ? That post contained some detail on decoding, bitwise, etc., as well.   REFRESHER Back to our previous example, we had a user with UAC value of 66048. We decoded 66048 into its two parts, 65536 and 512. I didn’t go into much detail on how I got those two values, so I thought I’d explain all that here. First, a background on bitwi