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

321–330 of 490 posts

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

#321

Post by fortran77 »

mikub wrote: post #310
roywashere wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son has a personal Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and he is signed in with his personal Microsoft account. The laptop went away for repairs because the touchpad no longer worked. When it returned, it turned out they replaced the main board so the bit locker keys needed to be entered again. These are typically stored in your Micsosoft account only they were nowhere to be found. Some help article on the MS website explain…

You can also backup your Bitlocker key to an USB-Stick or external HDD. When installing Win11 they even ask you if you want to back it up on your MS-Account or an external device.

I print mine out and put it in my safe. It's saved me a few times.

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

#322

Post by frankfrankfrank »

mastazi wrote: post #193
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. It is indeed a giant mess. If you go to live.com and click on the hamburger icon at the top, then under 'Apps' click on the "To-Do" app, you will be asked to enter the password for your work account, even though you are on live.com, not on office.com, and you are currently logged in with your personal account. The only way to get past this is to click "use another account" the…

First mistake is using any of the Microsoft knock off services whose primary purpose is to trick “deciders” in the C-suits and in halls of bureaucratic hell that can confirm that the box for things like “to do” functionality is checked on their list. Every single Microsoft service, including email, several decades later, is still deep into subpar.

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

#323

Post by synecdoche »

philliphaydon wrote: post #99
blep_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least my [...] Windows licenses are still working—but could the school revoke that access too? This, at least, is a thing I have never even had to consider as a remote possibility on Linux.

Sure. But every OS has its flaws. They are all good and bad in their own way.

This statement says next to nothing but may give the impression that it does to anyone who doesn't think twice on what it actually says. OS X and OS Y both have their good and bad sides but not necessarily near similar in terms of features and execution.

It's not an argument not should it be used as such.

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

#324

Post by pizzamig »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
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"...

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.

> 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.

Better solution: don't use M$ product, if you can. Despite the efforts and resources Microsoft spends in improving its products, languages, tools, they are just an enterprise company: very expensive buggy products.

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

#325

Post by Terretta »

low_tech_love wrote: post #315

I've never heard a single person who had positive experiences with Microsoft's cloud services (OneDrive or One*) and yet, every organizations seems to be slowly taken over by it.

> and yet, every organizations seems to be slowly taken over by it

Microsoft Office is a big deal. It's where the worker lives.

This is because Google didn't spend the money to make workplace software better than Office, only clunky web apps; while Microsoft spent the money to make web apps (nearly) as good as the workplace software everyone uses.

Google chose not to displace 80% of features of the incumbent, while the incumbent added the 20% Google had thought was enough.

So 85% of business workplaces and workplace users are O365/M365 workplaces and users.

Btw, if you make SaaS and don't support "Login with Microsoft..." or their (very easy to integrate) SAML SSO, you're leaving 85% of your TAM on the bench.

See https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth as an example of a sign-in that enables every workplace and identity.

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

#326

Post by berniedurfee »

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 not just MS, auth is a mess everywhere. Everyone wants to own your identity and we’ve ended up with an insane web of trust.

The many standards around identity management makes the web more complex. Most of us have many identities and we end up with a multidimensional web of tokens and cookies.

I think at some point something will have to give. This seems like a space where some more provider consolidation or collaboration would help.

Security is so important to get right, yet too easy to get wrong.

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

#327

Post by phpisthebest »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
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"...

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 FireFox Containers and the browser version of apps... works great for MS Accounts

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

#328

Post by jackmott42 »

roywashere wrote: post #292
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…

My son has a personal Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and he is signed in with his personal Microsoft account. The laptop went away for repairs because the touchpad no longer worked. When it returned, it turned out they replaced the main board so the bit locker keys needed to be entered again. These are typically stored in your Micsosoft account only they were nowhere to be found. Some help article on the MS website explain…

security is getting to be worse than what is protects against. its a daily bane, especially for work stuff as everything is locked down extra hard

they tried to simplify it by tying everything to yubi keys, but just this week some things stopped going to the yubikey and wanted me to auth on my phone like we used to instead.

ugh

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

#329

Post by jackmott42 »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #317

I’m not sure what people expect from anything associated with Microsoft. After literally many decades now of horrible Microsoft products and services that never ever reach the threshold (excel possibly being the lone exception), why would anyone expect anything other than abysmal things from Microsoft. It’s what happens when you let a robber Baron type corporation seize monopolistic control and there is effectively n…

C#, F# and visual studio code have been fantastic in recent years.

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

#330

Post by toss1 »

Macha wrote: post #294
roywashere wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son has a personal Windows 11 Lenovo laptop and he is signed in with his personal Microsoft account. The laptop went away for repairs because the touchpad no longer worked. When it returned, it turned out they replaced the main board so the bit locker keys needed to be entered again. These are typically stored in your Micsosoft account only they were nowhere to be found. Some help article on the MS website explain…

All this discussion makes me glad I'm sticking to local logins for the Windows devices I still have to use. Once that option is gone, I guess that's the end of Windows on my devices.

Yup, Microsoft can't even keep straight their account management, yet they are insisting on depreciating the local-only accounts.

I strictly use the local-only setup. I'm sort of OK if they still leave a relatively trivial backdoor to do this, but if they ever flat require an online account, I'm out, hard.

This is partially due to wanting to avoid the hassle and management of yet-another-forking-online-acct-IDGAF-about, but also because I have some machines controlling industrial processes (CNC machines, custom cutting machines, etc.) that I keep entirely off any network for security & safety reasons (yes, moving anything to/from those machines is all sneaker-net; simple, works, and my shop doesn't yet have the scale to justify that kind of networking/security/admin overhead).

I just hope that MS engineering is not stupid or powerless enough to allow MS marketing & MBAs to fully kill off the local account.

This entire attitude of exploiting customers by requiring spurious internet accounts & connections is making me start to think that the Internet is all a huge mistake. If that approach takes over, the world will literally be worse than before the Internet in every important way (and there are some solid arguments that it already is worse).

Post reply on HN