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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

#211

Post by nix23 »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #111
nix23 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

So you think Azure is the only "cloud"-platform that can run windows? I talked about Azure not an OS, this has nothing todo with Windows, DOS or Xenix.

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

#212

Post by gbear605 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #203
alentred wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

As I see it, Microsoft has become so incompetent as an organization that they can no longer be said to have core competencies.

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

#213

Post by skissane »

Meph504 wrote: post #209
skissane wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you talking about LTSC or something else?

I have looked into buying LTSC. Apparently you need a business (I own a “shelf” company which has never done anything, but legally it counts), and a Microsoft volume license agreement. I looked into the later. Supposedly there is this trick where you order all these useless-but-cheap Identity Manager CALs to cheaply meet the minimum order requirement for a volume license. But I got a bit stuck working out what to order (or even if it was still available through resellers in my country). I lost interest at that point.

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

#214

Post by brightball »

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…

It’s much worse than just auth too. Microsoft’s security policy around email is so bad that using Office 365 email should be considered a security problem.

They’re actively enabling phishing because they choose to rollback standards support.

https://www.brightball.com/articles/how-microsoft-became-phi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34911811

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

#215

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

Optimisation for maximising profit, yay!

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

#216

Post by goosedragons »

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.

You can get a streaming stick with the remote for like $50. It will come with all the stupid DRM in place required to stream 1080p/4K/HDR whatever and it'll be designed to be used from 10 feet away with a remote. Plus it'll use like 3W of power.

Setting that all up on PC is much more of a chore.

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

#217

Post by Meph504 »

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.

Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates. For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspects of the tenant.

They now are giving teams (slack knockoff) a free dialing number so it now can be used for phone conferencing without non-organizational people.

Onedrive gives you 1Tb of syncable storage per user, and 1TB per user pool for shared office resources.

I spent years as a google apps advocate, but seriously for the money, no one touchs what MS is offering right now. Google had MS hands down 10 years ago, and let google apps die on the vine. It is a damn shame too, because they were the only ones that have anything comparable.

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

#218

Post by deadbunny »

ccouzens wrote: post #120
tacker2000 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opera…

You can configure linux to directly boot into Kodi with zero interaction very easily[1]. If you pickup a machine with an IR sensor (some Intel NUCs for example) then you can configure it to use a remote[2]. RPis have HDMI-CEC which mean you can use your TV remote[3]. With that said I just use a mini keyboard[4] as it's the easiest and moat versatile for me, definitely not the most user friendly for people who don't know the keys though!).

Admittedly I only have local media and YouTube (via a Kodi Plugin)and don't use any streaming services so Kodi fulfils my needs perfectly.

1. https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Autostart_Kodi_for_Linux

2. https://kodi.wiki/view/Remote_controls

3. https://pimylifeup.com/raspberrypi-hdmi-cec/

4. http://www.riitek.com/product/k08x.html

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

#220

Post by einpoklum »

Oh, that's nice of them - now you can stop using a "personal Microsoft account", which is really not something you want to have.

Too bad that they didn't let you make a copy of what you had - mistakenly - stored on that account though.

PS - Suggest you don't make the mistake of replacing that with a personal Google account.

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