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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

#201

Post by rightbyte »

hosteur wrote: post #181
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.

This seems like a clear case of selection bias. People with Linux and Mac are probably devs and technical people who will obviously utilize a much broader range of functionality of their machines and thus encounter more edge cases.

Ye clear selection bias. Most users can't describe a problem in enough detail to get to "2nd line" support in the first place.

You more or less need to be a dev-ish person to prove IT is at fault. The lusers have to live with the unplug the computer and reboot workarounds.

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

#202

Post by Meph504 »

theK wrote: post #42
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…

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"...

They have actually made a lot of improvements to this process recently allowing for multi tenant login in a single browser.

If you use firefox, you can use each other the container types to host different login accounts, it makes it easier than switching between private windows and doesn't require you to enable extensions on your private tabs

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

#203

Post by makeitdouble »

alentred wrote: post #194
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Although I agree that companies (Microsoft, Google, etc.) deliberately seek to authenticate you across the web, I do not think that the general mess with Microsoft authentication is on purpose. It looks like generations of implementations (and likely generations of product management and development teams) layering on top of each other, "replacing" the "old" systems only to do the half of it, and integrating with acq…

> I do not think that the general mess with Microsoft authentication is on purpose.

Microsoft has been dealing with online identity almost since the consumer web exists. MSN launched in 1995, Outlook was the poster child of webmail, ActiveDirectory is the behemoth of enterprise user management.

I don’t see Hanlon’s razor relevant when it’s on one of their core competency. They at least committed to throw part of their users under the bus to pursue their goals.

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

#204

Post by irusensei »

amatecha wrote: post #142
iplist wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running Kodi for over a decade now. It starts on boot, so all I have to do is start the desktop. Remote works with an open source Anroid app, it also allows streaming from Kodi to your phone and vice versa. Youtube works fine, never tried Disney+/Netflix, I'm not sure that's possible.

Kodi has YouTube? YT was the only reason I didn't just set up a Pi 4 or whatever. Already got one LibreELEC system for the home theatre, but wanted YT for the "daily driver" TV display. I assumed any YT plugin for Kodi would be persistently behind API changes and often not working, etc... is my assumption wrong? Would be great to hear if so haha

YouTube nerfed their api in a way that using third party clients is from hard to impossible. Things like requiring users to register api keys etc.

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

#205

Post by watermelon0 »

smallstepforman wrote: post #178
fcatalan wrote: post #37

My kids' school and high school use Teams for some stuff. I have to use it occasionally for work too. The thing is that's nigh impossible to simply log out as one user and back in as another, so we have to take a lot of care of who used this or that device last. And don't get me started on the nightmare that is dealing with Minecraft accounts older than the Mojang acquisition. It's not only Microsoft. Trying to subsc…

My son gave me a hard time for Valorant secure boot requirement on Windows 11 (but not 10). As a triple boot user (Haiku and Linux), secure boot is a no go on my box, since I reboot frequently.

I assume most anti-cheat systems will sooner or later require Secure Boot and TPM, which makes a lot of sense. Additionally, it's more secure to have them enabled, and similar solutions have been used on iOS/Android/macOS for a long time now.

Many Linux distributions have signed bootloader and kernel, to support secure boot, but otherwise I think you could either add your own signing keys for the Secure Boot, or chain either Linux or Haiku from a signed grub bootloader.

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

#206

Post by alentred »

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…

> Auth with MS accounts is a giant mess.

I agree. It is surprising that we don't see similar issues more often. It is *so* confusing to both users and the developers, to the point where it's too easy to make some naive mistakes. And it is one of most critical parts of the systems!

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

#207

Post by Meph504 »

pid-1 wrote: post #192
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 (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. During the pandemic, a key security component of our remote work architecture was to use Azure AD Conditional Access to restrict users to login in M365 apps from…

Windows 11 allows for the creation of local accounts, it sounds like someone signed in with a azureAD account (work email) joining the azure AD basically drops a lot of default policies on the machine, one of those is disabling local admin.

They can either remove that policy from their azure AD, or remove the machine from the azure ad.

Or update their policies to allow for azureAD joined machines.

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

#208

Post by bjelkeman-again »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #153
Aeolun wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or the technical infrastructure doesn’t support them well. Or the support team doesn’t know MacOS or Linux, so it becomes a lot harder to provide support. There could be many reasons.

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

#209

Post by Meph504 »

skissane wrote: post #130
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They can never “close the loopholes” entirely, because there are customers that want machines with zero access to public Internet (embedded systems, national security, etc), where a Microsoft account is an absolute non-starter. Closing all the loopholes would be abandoning those market segments (many of which are already trending towards Linux/etc anyway) I suppose they might make it mandatory unless you have some sp…

They actually already make a special version of windows for those purposes and it isn't available to the open market. Government editions that have no telemetry, advertising, or integrated cloud products at all.

I know it is a pipe dream but I wish they could be forced to sell this to the general public.

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

#210

Post by Karellen »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #54
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.

"Because it's cheap." Lots of "leaders" don't see much further than that...

If that were the reason, the year of Linux on the desktop would have happened 20 years ago.
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