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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

#151

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

gchadwick wrote: post #26

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

This is obviously done on purpose. In the same way that Google ties users to Android devices when you add a Gmail account, MS takes every opportunity to assign their online account whenever they catch you off guard (installing a local Teams app instead of joining through the browser, signing into Minecraft at your school etc.). At this point you need to go through all the steps of dissociating your account from these devices. Sometimes they will reassign them after an update, so you need to watch out.

For that reason I never use MS online apps on my private devices and whenever I need to sign in online, I always use the private mode or a dedicated Firefox container.

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

#152

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

One of the magical things microsoft has accomplished is that governments and corporates trust them so much.

Some kind of Stockholm syndrom.

Here in the Netherlands they somehow have convinced local governments (like cities & provinces) that working with them is still GDPR compliant, even thought they should only work with EU based companies to store data. But other companies like DigitalOcean, AWS and Google cloud (especially Google is evil) are not GDPR compliant

As a dev learning web development when IE was still a thing I still have horrible experiences with them

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

#153

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

Aeolun wrote: post #148
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as someone who has done support for a 28000 person organisation, 27500 of which are using mostly Microsoft products on windows for 90% of the time and 500 of which are using Mac or Linux and doing other stuff I can tell you that at least 50% of the security incidents and second line support issues came from those 500 users.

Did those 500 users also happen to be the ones that weren’t adequately supported because they were seen as problem children? If my org doesn’t give me a supported way to do absolutely necessary thing X, then I’ll find my own way to do it.

As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.

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

#154

Post by isodev »

gchadwick wrote: post #26

Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess. When I was a city councillor I had a corporate O365 account from the council (used for council email and virtual meetings over teams) and simply trying to sign out of the thing or switch to another account was always fraught (I've got a personal account that's basically just to associate my windows license with and a work account used for azure access). You'd often end up in a s…

I have the same experience!

In my case, my personal and professional Microsoft addresses are the same (same email, different accounts) which means that in many cases I end up in impossible situations when the login screen doesn’t correctly guess if I want to sign in personal or with my “work” account. I also do client work for organisations where I need to sign into their O365 and honestly the only way to manage all that is to keep a dedicated browser “per account”.

Teams is a different story, I avoid account switching because exactly like you describe, sometimes I need to uninstall it in order to sign out.

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

#155

Post by zamnos »

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.

No, you're not. Specifically, unless you configure things juuuust right, then the alt-tab behavior and the taskbar/dock behavior is different. Not a show stopping "bug", but let's not pretend it's entirely workflow transparent to use it from Chrome.

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

#156

Post by userbinator »

nvrspyx wrote: post #81
userbinator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single button that says "Yes" with no question mark anywhere in the dialog is definitely a dark pattern.

I didn't even notice that the dialog title, "Use this account everywhere on this device", isn't really presented as a question. Thanks for pointing that out. Windows is full of dark patterns, so I don't really know why I had even a modicum of doubt.

That's not even the title either --- it's just bigger text within the dialog. The actual dialog title in the titlebar is blank!

Between the aforementioned dark pattern with the buttons/not-buttons (they didn't even bother to vertically align "This app only" and the button), the not-a-question "do what we tell you" phrasing, the blank title, and a dialog that's overall around twice as tall as it needs to be, it seems recent Windows is unfortunately full of user-hostile and also disgustingly amateurish WTFs like this.

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

#157

Post by geoelectric »

b800h wrote: post #115

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 ut…

Horrible UI if you can do a fundamental account change without some kind of password re-confirmation.

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

#158

Post by flakeoil »

oefrha wrote: post #132
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…

Well I still have a non-signed-in local account on my Windows 11 Pro install, but of course every time I boot up I get a full screen “finish setting up your device” before I’m allowed to sign in. The only options are “continue” and “remind me in three days”. Better yet, I once clicked on continue by accident and the computer hang for three minutes before I shut it down. Now I only reboot when the machine BSODs, which…

I have the same issue with "finish setting up your device". I don't understand how this can be legal. In the early 2000 MS got fined for bundling IE as default, but I seriously think they have even more evil patterns now baked into Windows and all it's entangling into 365 etc.

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

#159

Post by alibarber »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #134
tester756 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is moving a personal account to a different country an insanely obscure edge case? Because I tried to do that recently with O365 and I literally couldn't move my subscription without killing the old one and creating a new one. Every other software service I use somehow managed to make it easy: fill in the new billing details. Done. But not Microsoft. Billing and fulfilment details are on different pages, there's no o…

I have literally received (temporary) work visas for other countries, travelled, etc etc with greater ease than moving some online accounts I have (Apple).

Even having physical copies of The Economist follow me, with the same subscription, was easier.

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

#160

Post by qalmakka »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devic…

Don't mix up poop and chocolate - while Google's accounts aren't really that great (the whole GSuite mish-mash of nonsense doesn't really help), they are several orders of magnitude better than whatever MS is trying to do here. You have a million different ways to permanently screw yourself with a MS account, especially since they basically kept all the "account types" hidden while applying over them a veneer of homogeneity. You can basically use any Google account everywhere a Google account is required, but personal and corporate MS accounts are basically two different things that reuse some infrastructure while not being compatible the slightest. Even when logging in in Windows, there are a dozen ways to enroll a MS account, and most if not all of them are not compatible with each other. There's always a very high chance of getting your Windows account messed up, not accessible, or impossible to log in to.
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