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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

#221

Post by xxs »

harryf wrote: post #93

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.

It happened during the weekend, so there is none of the school administrators to help with - but that's not the worst. Such behavior should not be possible and his daughter should not be able to grant such permissions either. The school =should= know it's not a kid's account to begin with. None of the blame should be attributed to the school but Microsoft - there is no feasible way for the person to reclaim his account.

In short - you are missing a lot.

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

#222

Post by wil421 »

LeonB wrote: post #43
ryanjshaw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try having a kid and segregating funds for them while paying for their Xbox Game Pass and a Minecraft Realm with your account. I have 25 years of Windows software development experience and I was almost reduced to tears just trying to understand what I'm even trying to accomplish. Realms is still in some kind of half subscribed, half not subscribed state and it still asks for my account's PIN for purchases but actual…

I witnessed an egregious bug once - where logging in with one users name and a different users 2FA let me in. I just looked for my notes on it and can’t find them. I’m happy for you not to take my word on it other than to say — I concur that there are some egregious bugs in this area!

At one of my jobs Workday had a cookie config that let some security guy change his user ID to the CIO’s user and log in. It was hilarious to watch.

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

#223

Post by goosedragons »

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…

I'm pretty sure I did the same thing accidentally when trying to use my university's provided Office365. It bonded onto my personal Live account and was hard and annoying to figure out how to remove.

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

#224

Post by deadbunny »

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

You need to setup your own set of API keys (fairly easy) but it canl break for a week or so at a time when YT make changes that need updates for but it's reasonably rare (one every couple of years).

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

#225

Post by tacker2000 »

goosedragons wrote: post #216
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.

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.

Yes sure, but i was talking about OPs nvidia shield, which costs like 200 bucks and it also has gaming capabilities.

If all you want is netflix and youtube then of course a 50$ chrome stick is fine.

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

#226

Post by MrStonedOne »

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…

[dead]

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

#228

Post by tacker2000 »

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…

There exist a couple of wireless media keyboards with integrated trackpads like a large one from logitech or microsoft or some small ones from obscure chinese companies on amazon. There are also remotes that you can connect over bluetooth.

https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wireless-Media-Keyboard-N9Z...

https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Wireless-Multi-touch-Certifi...

https://www.amazon.com/Rii-Wireless-Bluetooth-Backlight-RTi8...

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

#229

Post by hyperman1 »

ashgoyal wrote: post #180

This is a giant mess. Frankly, i don't understand how they architected it. If i open a word, excel or ppt document from another companies SharePoint because they added me as a guest, Microsoft promptly signs me out of the desktop office 365 apps and then says that i am using unlicensed office365. How was this missed when designing the security and authentication systems?? This is basic foundational stuff!

That's easy to answer: It is not architected, it is organically grown.

Product A adds a sign in. Product B from another team adds another sign in. Product C,D,E do the same. Each team has some special magic sauce that makes their system work better with their product, but worse with all others.

Now the corporate infighting starts, as management squeezes all these sign-in systems together, and everyone looses if any other but their system wins. So some compromise is created, based more on political prowess than technical requirements. The result is an API from hell, taking fragments from everyone, even if they conflict. Everyone pushes and pulls their existing systems until it fits in the compromise, trying to minimizing damage. Weird cracks appear everywhere.

we've all seen the organizational charts meme:

https://www.euroresidentes.com/tecnologia/noticias-internet/...

Remember how each organization builds a solution based on their organogram. Look at microsoft in the meme. Look at the sign in mess. Understand.

I predict strange, probably exploitable and surely unsolvable problems in the MS sign-in system for at least the next decade, just like their programming practices of the '90s had entirely predictable security consequences for a decade when the internet appeared.

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

#230

Post by quickthrower2 »

Kwpolska wrote: post #187
neodon wrote: post #108

Am I the only one who uses browser profiles to separate my personal browsing from work or other organizations I'm a part of? When I mention this approach to people they give me a strange look like I'm crazy. In Chrome you just create a new profile for each identity you have. If you're opening random incognito windows or using different browsers all the time to log in with different identities, you should be creating…

I go even further, corporate laptop for work, personal laptop for personal stuff.

Essential if you are an employee. Same machine may be ok as a freelancer.
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