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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

341–350 of 490 posts

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

#341
post #235

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…

Google’s handing of multiple accounts is still terrible though since everything is based off an index in order of sign in. Share or bookmark a work link? /u/2 is embedded in it. If later the personal account was the second login, you’d get access denied. They’re better at offering a switch account ui in some places but definitely not most.

This is one of the main reasons I love Firefox’s “Multi Account Containers” extension. I can easily keep logins segregated and don’t need to worry about whether any given part of Google’s ecosystem plays nicely with their account picker.

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

#342
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

I use NewPipe and choose to stream to Kodi. That has worked fine for the last few years, even with an outdated Kodi YouTube plugin.

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

#343

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.

MS fired all the MSR programming language people working on F# and C# a few years ago, so you can probably expect the trend of C# and F# improvement to taper off.

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

#344
post #235

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…

Google’s handing of multiple accounts is still terrible though since everything is based off an index in order of sign in. Share or bookmark a work link? /u/2 is embedded in it. If later the personal account was the second login, you’d get access denied. They’re better at offering a switch account ui in some places but definitely not most.

If you're bookmarking, you can edit the URL and use `?authuser=foo@bar.com` instead.

So instead of:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#starred

bookmark:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?authuser=foo@bar.com#starred

The URL will be immediately rewritten as the proper /u/# for that user (which, as you say, depends on login order).

Not sure why it's like this, but I could see it being related to not wanting PII in the URL.

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

#345
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> numerous domains including msn, microsoft, live.com, and others that I cannot recall. Dont forget the og domain, hotmail.com

And their newer, suspicious-looking domains: 1drv.ms (OneDrive file sharing) microsoftonline.com (something to do with Azure) b2clogin.com (replacement for microsoftonline.com)

live.com

outlook.com

Windows Store

xbox

Skype

Families

Office 365

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

#346
It is a mess and there is more to it.

I have 2 Microsoft accounts on the same email address, one is a personal account I created ~ 10 years ago and one that appeared out of the blue a few years ago. The second one seems to be created by my employer, when I try to login it is rerouting me to the job 2FA. The weirdest thing was when I tried to schedule an exam with Microsoft and it appears as free on the work account, for some reason, but not free on my personal account.

I also had OneDrive set up on my personal desktop. After years of working well, one day I got an error and I had a look: it merged my personal OneDrive with the work one, so my Witcher 3 saved games were on my company's storage. I guess this happened because I tried to add my work account in Outlook to read email on that computer too. Since then, I am doing all the work related tasks in a Virtual Machine with a local Windows account and no email, no Teams, no OneDrive, etc.

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

#347
post #73
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and finally found a singular customer support page that happens to mention it That's the kind of results Google should be surfacing, but it lost the game, it is so useless now for precision searching.

Google should be surfacing things which paint google in a bad light?

Google should be surfacing what its policies actually are, period. If those policies paint Google in a bad light, it should reconsider them, not be coy about them.

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

#348
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lost hours are totally invisible (most companies wouldn't even allow you to report them. they don't WANT to see them) and the alternative world without lost hours with more productivity can also not be imagined by those in charge. For all it's terrible bugs and login issues, is there even alterative with similar functionality that would be as "user friendly" (as in: non-tech people would know how to use it as wel…

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

I am a linux guy, always have been. But when I went from a Windows environment company to a Mac company I was absolutely shocked by how much less work I had to do with Mac to get everything working. Authentication, logging in, slack vs teams, just everything worked so much better.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same problem recently. Just ended up buying a new computer just for work stuff. They pay me a lot so I can afford to buy M1 Air which is still really really fast. Is it ecological? No. But the compliance beast must be fed. So fine.

If an employer requires device registration (MDM etc), they should provide the hardware.

Yeah well, they should, but again they pay so good that it’s not really worth arguing about.

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

#350
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…

We took on a client on Azure 4-5 years ago. something happened to my MS account at that time, that made it impossible to sign in to a random subset of MS services (it would either report that the pw was invalid, or I didn’t have permissions).

It was something like two accounts existed in the system with the same email address and one of them had permissions, but we couldn’t sign in to it and the other we could sign in to, but didn’t have permissions and there was no way to grant it permissions.

I spent several hours with MS support over a few days while they tried to sort it out, reset passwords, sign in via different systems, etc. Eventually they recommend we create a new account.

I stopped working with Azure clients, instead.

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