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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

#331

Post by sgerenser »

literalAardvark wrote: post #252
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, they're just really difficult to support. MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.

They also make it really easy to screw things up. I work at Microsoft, and a few weeks ago they rolled out a botched group policy change for our whole org that somehow deleted all O365 apps and Docker from most people’s machines. The best part is you’d try to launch, say, Excel and you’d get an error about it being removed for being possibly malicious.

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

#332

Post by danaris »

bboygravity wrote: post #243
hkt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX seems fine for most people where I've worked. For the truly intractable Windows addict, maybe ReactOS? https://reactos.org/

I don't see how that is related to what I wrote? Mac is not an alternative functionality to: Teams, Outlook, MS Office, etc? It doesn't solve the MS crappy auth system, it doesn't give (large) businesses the same functionality that MS is giving them.

On the Mac, you can use those MS products without it taking over your user account.

You can also use any of various other products that compete with them (Google Apps, iWork, Zoom, etc).

Just because MS makes a specific package that businesses like doesn't mean that they can't use something else if MS is becoming more of a problem than they're worth.

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

#333

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

literalAardvark wrote: post #252
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, they're just really difficult to support. MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.

Oh, so it's not the users at all, it's that you have tools to manage Windows and didn't set up tools to manage anything else even though they exist; like a Linux admin complaining that Windows is unmanageable because ansible doesn't work well on it.

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

#334

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #279
Karellen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Linux was not and is not cheap at all. Downloading it might be free, but the initial price doesn't matter compared the cost of running it for a whole organization.

We are literally in a threat complaining that the cost of Windows is wildly higher than the cost of buying a box copy of the software. So yeah, in this context Linux is free.

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

#336

Post by blendergeek »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devic…

> Google already does it with Android.

I have seen this on HackerNews multiple times. I bought a Google Pixel this past week and set it up. I have not logged into a Google Account. Maybe if you give the phone internet access during setup, it doesn't give you the local account option. But I can attest that Google has not (yet?) closed the "offline account" loophole.

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

#337

Post by mariojv »

Yikes. Lots of weird auth-related news coming out of Microsoft in the past week or so. A coworker shared this vulnerability disclosure the other day: https://www.praetorian.com/blog/azure-b2c-crypto-misuse-and-...

I’d be curious about a follow up if the author ever figures out how the account takeover happened. I wonder if logging into the account on a school device resulted in automatic enrollment or something.

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

#338

Post by mariojv »

curiousguy wrote: post #185
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…

This makes sense, but this should had ask the account password to confirm, which Jeff’s daughter may know and typed. IMO, The main issue in here is BigTech obsession with a single login. One single credentials give you access to everything, from entertainment to professional services. People do share their credentials with family, specially if involves subscription and payment. BigTech try so hard to push for not sha…

It would be interesting if there were auth standards related to linking family accounts or different identities. OIDC tries to extend OAuth to human identity characteristics but doesn’t quite get there. Maybe you could hack it in with custom claims, but first class support for codifying relations between users would be neat, instead of having every auth provider roll their own half broken implementation.
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