My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account • Hacker News Board

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#91

Post by tacker2000 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:46 AM UTC

tgv wrote: post #16

greggsy wrote: post #12

Despite the implication of malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft, this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. Nonetheless, I would have expected MS to ensure that the process includes clearer guidance for the account owner, and for deliberate decisions to be made by the school to enable this type of action. They did a very good job of provid…

> this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. The school's IT team should never have had the means to do that.

Yea why would some random schools IT be able to add some random account to their org?? Thats a rights/policy issue that needs to be addressed.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#92

Post by tester756 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:47 AM UTC

dustedcodes wrote: post #52

theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

because it actually works

you can try to find as many edge cases,

but at the end of the day I just log into the account that's inside domain and everything:

email, teams, network accesses, auth thru web apps goes thru that domain account

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#93

Post by harryf » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:47 AM UTC

Am I missing something or where is the part where he contacted the school or spoke to his daughter about it, _before_ writing blog posts and getting on Twitter?

It's strange to me to take the discussion like this to public forums before talking to the people involved. It could be his daughter "gave" it to the school as an act of generosity for example.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#94

Post by irusensei » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:48 AM UTC

I think something similar happened to my google cloud account. I’ve used to run some websites and CIs for some small clients then I got a jig for a bigger client and they included my account into their organization. It wasn’t as crippling tho and also easily reversible.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#95

Post by rmellow » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:50 AM UTC

ta1243 wrote: post #73

visarga wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it That's the kind of results Google should be surfacing, but it lost the game, it is so useless now for precision searching.

Google should be surfacing things which paint google in a bad light?

It does. "Google search sucks" returns what you'd expect.

What GP is getting at is that Google Search breaks down often when you're looking for a very specific result, but one that is uncommon enough. Instead, you're often diverted to a "related" query result without them telling you.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#96

Post by WWLink » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:50 AM UTC

That is absolutely insane and one of many reasons I hate microsoft with a passion.

WTF kinda power trip are they on when they let domain admins just pwn accounts like that? How did OP end up in this situation? Was his email just on a distribution list and usurped that way? I don't get it. And I find it kinda freaky.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#97

Post by iamacyborg » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:52 AM UTC

tacker2000 wrote: post #83

amatecha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the produ…

I was looking at a media center/gaming emulation device and to be honest i dont see the benefit of these android based TV devices or Apple TV anymore. You can buy a good mini-pc for a couple hundred bucks and its much more powerful and flexible. You can run windows or linux etc and hook up any keyboard, controller, remote, and do whatever you like.

Apple TV is useful as a homekit controller if you care about that sort of thing.

That’s about it though.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#98

Post by lultimouomo » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:54 AM UTC

b800h wrote: post #66

lultimouomo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to accept it. Just don't use Microsoft. (If your school forces you to, create a throwaway account for that, and let the principal know that you are not a happy customer)

And then your child has a Mojang account, and then you can't use Minecraft because the throwaway account is associated with your phone number, and it's tied into the Active Directory of ..... This sort of scenario. Or a million others.

Having an account for your child schools is kind of a necessity. Using Minecraft is not. It seems to be a nice game and children like it; it sucks that Microsoft bought it. Still not a good enough reason to use Microsoft.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#99

Post by philliphaydon » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:54 AM UTC

blep_ wrote: post #82

philliphaydon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is no more bad than macOS or any distro of linux.

> At least my [...] Windows licenses are still working—but could the school revoke that access too? This, at least, is a thing I have never even had to consider as a remote possibility on Linux.

Sure. But every OS has its flaws. They are all good and bad in their own way.

Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

#100

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

ccouzens wrote: post #87

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.

Or run apps like Teams in a web browser. Web browsers have good isolation techniques like Chrome's profiles and Firefox's containers. Teams is written using web technologies so you're getting the same experience as the app.

The problem is that Windows 11 and above (try very hard to) require a Microsoft account, because these orcas of computing want to remind you with every step that you don't own the device you bought. Hence it's simpler/better to just virtualize everything.

Besides, there is a very satisfactory feeling when something doesn't work for whatever reason, you do a quick search and see that apparently you must edit some awfully named HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE register or rename some /AppData to .old (just had to do this yesterday, wild), and then, when the quick fix doesn't work, instead of trying to look for more fixes you just give up and start cussing until the VM is restored to a working backup.