Accessing the Internet from PowerShell

I had many potential titles for this series of posts, as yes, this is the first of a series. The aim of the series is to slowly guide you through interacting with web pages from within PowerShell, extending to downloading and uploading files, posting data to forms and interacting with WebDAV. My aim is to start by talking about each individual task, accessing a page, posting/uploading, download files, etc; cover off some of the issues we might encounter or what things to be on the look out for when working within a corporate environment (authentication and proxy servers) and finally bring everything together into 1) a working PasteBin scrapper that will look for the occurrences of certain works and notify us and 2) a PowerShell module which will allow us to quickly perform all of the above mention web/internet related tasks. I will provide a tonne of examples along the way to assist in helping you understand all of the different concepts that are involved.