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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

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

#111

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

nix23 wrote: post #88
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.

The real solution is not to use systems who allows that.

Of course, the problem is that in the last 38 years [1] plenty of programs have been developed for Windows-only, especially when you have to interact with the state [2]: there are still tutorials out there that require you open a website in Internet Explorer (!) if you want to validate a tax form or whatever other trivial task.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_version_hist...

[2] All the backroom deals for Windows/Office licenses for state-use certainly helped in this regard, https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

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

#112

Post by roxgib »

I dodged a somewhat similar experience with Zoom. Took a contract with a company, and they tried to adopt my personal zoom account into their organisation (I was a contractor, so I was using my own email address while working for them). Fortunately I realised this might be annoying down the road and sent them an alias to use instead, but I imagine other people could get into strife - not that a Zoom account is a big deal and they seem to have better processes in place so it's possible it's easy to resolve, but it could easily cause a headache for a less tech savvy user.

In general, be careful what you click agree to (I know, I know)

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

#113

Post by hkt »

bboygravity wrote: post #80
dustedcodes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lost hours are totally invisible (most companies wouldn't even allow you to report them. they don't WANT to see them) and the alternative world without lost hours with more productivity can also not be imagined by those in charge. For all it's terrible bugs and login issues, is there even alterative with similar functionality that would be as "user friendly" (as in: non-tech people would know how to use it as wel…

OSX seems fine for most people where I've worked. For the truly intractable Windows addict, maybe ReactOS?

https://reactos.org/

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

josephg wrote: post #18
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. No matter how inexperienced they are, it shouldn’t be possible to put an external Microsoft account into this weird state without the account holder’s permission. And the “leave organisation” button shouldn’t leave the account in some weird unrecoverable state. This all reeks of sloppy product design on Microsoft’s par…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by b800h »

My suspicion is that what's happened here is that Jeff's daughter has used his laptop for something from school and clicked straight through an overly-inviting message that asked to join the account to the school's domain.

I'm skeptical of the suggestion that the school admins were able to do this with no input, but I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that:

a) AD login is a complete mess, and

b) the UI is utterly misleading and near-unusable.

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

#116

Post by lostlogin »

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.

I’m blown away by this. I’ve come back to a full MS stack after years away and it’s grim. Machine shave to be restarted once or more times per day. My personal MacBook is restarted every month or two. I used to moan about Apple’s software quality, but maybe we are actually in Isaac Asimov’s accelerating decline to a dark age.

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

#117

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

Strom wrote: post #109
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 awfu…

> The problem is that Windows 11 and above require a Microsoft account It is not quite a requirement, I have my Windows 11 Pro running just fine with no Microsoft account. They do attempt really hard to make it look like it's required though. Even going as far as showing a fullscreen app after Windows update that only has options for registering or login, but luckily Alt+F4 closes that abomination.

Edited. I just didn't even bothered; given the trend, probably Windows 12 or 13 will close the loopholes.

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

#119

Post by croes »

kl343 wrote: post #106

Firmly agree with other posters that Microsoft's identity services leave a lot to be desired... but Jeff is being a bit sensationalist here. The school did not "take over" his MS account. At some point (likely amidst a mountain of other onboarding tasks for his daughter's enrollment) he would have received an invitation to join the school's Azure AD tenant as a guest/external user. In this case, he chose to join usin…

>he would have received an invitation to join the school's Azure AD.

Speculation.

And even if he received such a mail, were the consequences made obvious to the user?

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

#120

Post by ccouzens »

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.

I'd be interested to hear how you'd get the usability to be as good as an operating system designed to be used with a remote running apps designed to be run with a remote.

Having to use a mouse and keyboard is a pain point for me when I use my desktop on my TV from the couch. For the mouse I use the trackpad on a ps5 controller, so the mouse isn't so bad.

Possibly you could: * Not require passwords for everyday operation of your computer * Boot into some sort of launcher designed for televisions * Have a fairly narrow set of apps and services that work well with your setup. For example I don't know how you'd use Netflix or Disney plus with a remote on Linux.

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