Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 490 posts

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

#231

Post by dismalpedigree »

MrPatan wrote: post #146
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…

When I saw Minecraft for the Nintendo Switch I bought it, thinking it'd be a solution for the MS login madness and my kid could play easily with it. Wrong! It's even worse! You still have to log in with some MS account, but on top it's buggy, slow, laggy, and crashed a few times on me generating the world. What a disaster.

Same story here. Thought it would be great for kids to play. Takes 30 minutes of me screwing with it every time they want to play it. I gave up and put linux on an old laptop and them bought another copy of minecraft for it.

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

#232

Post by dismalpedigree »

LeonB wrote: post #8
LeonB wrote: post #5

The way Microsoft accounts work is almost completely opaque to users. I’ve been in similar scenarios — the switch directory or switch organisation technique usually worked for me - but wasn’t enough for this person. They never really give you enough information to tell what’s going on… maybe it’s a security risk to have consumers who are anything other than bewildered Kafkerian characters struggling against a faceles…

Now, if Microsoft bought Atlassian — that would be absolute theoretical maximum limit of peak confusion when logging into an app. “Warning: You are about to login to Microsoft Atlassian Fogbugz Trello. Have you cleared sufficient space in your calendar, notified your next of kin, put your affairs in order, and taken your sedatives?”

Ha. You have two factor on MS, main atlassian, and former bitbucket? Prepare for peak confusion. Three different MFAs will be needed but we wont tell you which one is for which step. Oh and if you make a mistake you get to start all over!

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

#233

Post by rightbyte »

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…

Ye exactly. The intent was probably to make their spyware login front work good. It would speed up adaption.

I think some people are mixing up Hanlon's razor with "if it is bad, the malice part can't be on purpose".

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

#234

Post by beAbU »

Similar thing happened to me.

Worked on a project for a big bank. My work email was given access to their Active Directory or whatever for certain sharepoint folder access.

My work machine is signed into my /personal/ microsoft account for login, and then also signed into my work-personal account (i.e. MS account with my work email, but a self created personal one - we're not an MS company).

At some point I was kicked off my Xbox, had to do a password reset dance to get access again, all because Big Bank's password expiry policy somehow leaked into my personal MS account thanks to being signed into both accounts on the same pc.

And now, my company got an Active Directory for us, purely to make interfacing with other MS-powered clients easier. Imagine the nightmare of my work account, originally created by myself, and the conflicts with my new "work or school" AD account. It's such a mess.

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

#235

Post by YPPH »

Google and Microsoft couldn't be further apart in their login architecture, and their distinguishing of personal and work accounts. Google does an excellent job, everything is unified and sensible. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a mess. It looks like everything is mishmashed together. Sometimes logins will fail completely and you get weird error messages which look out of place in a production environment.

Take but one bad example. If you look carefully, the sign in page for OneDrive is slightly different to the sign in page for other Microsoft services. It has functional differences too, namely, OneDrive's login page doesn't offer you FIDO2 passwordless authentication. Meanwhile, over on Google, everything goes through a unified login screen (accounts.google.com).

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

#236

Post by paavope »

longlostship wrote: post #166
oefrha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/turn-off-notific... You're welcome.

> Under Notifications, clear the checkbox next to Suggest ways I can finish setting up my device to get the most out of Windows.

Not a Windows user, but that wording of the setting is making me irrationally angry

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

#237

Post by hyperman1 »

Two of my experiences:

Some years ago, my android tablet could only read my work's office365 mail if I allowed a microsoft app to reconfigure the security. Next thing I know, I can only log in on it with my work AD account. But the WIFI is disabled, I can't enable WIFI without logging in, and WIFI is required for the AD logon process. It took a factory reset and complete erasure to pull it out of that one. Lost a good (paid) app in the process. I also learned the corporation can remotely erase the tabled whenever they like, and neither their security nor their hardware team were good thinking trough the consequences of their actions.

Second was a teams install used by me and some other people to videochat each other. One day, the school invites us to a meeting, after which teams decided the account now belongs to the school. Meetings with another institute were now impossible, as team's tiny brain could not allow the school and the institute to mix. For now, I deal by creating a new microsoft account for each meeting, and nuking the teams install afterwards.

My general attitude with microsoft is now: On non-MS browsers, delete all caches and settings when done, or use a different profile. On non-MS OSes, delete any login account they touched. When using any MS system like edge or windows, require different physical or virtual computers for each identity, they will leak into each other.

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

#238

Post by literalAardvark »

Meph504 wrote: post #217
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.

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 aspe…

And they're about to introduce GPT3/4 text generation into their products... And possibly image generation because why not.

It's just too good to ignore.

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

#240

Post by literalAardvark »

lostlogin wrote: post #116
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.

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.

I only restart on patch Tuesdays, you have a different problem than Windows.
Post reply on HN