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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

#401

Post by toss1 »

andrepd wrote: post #388
toss1 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-abo…

> 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 Sounds like a huge pain to deal with. Why not switch to Linux and be done with it? Genuine question.

Primarily because the CAD app I use (Rhino3D) doesn't have a native Linux version ('tho it supposedly runs on WINE), and the CAM software doesn't seem to have anyone running it on Linux.

Plus, at the outset of another startup, we decided to go Open-Source everything, and tried to setup a real-time version of Linux and the CNC control software. All of it supposedly up and running with only a few dozen steps to setup in the people supposedly running it. Despite decades in networking and a bit of Linux experience, I quickly got swamped in the massive undocumented bugs in setup/config/complile, and brought in a guy who had a full-time Linux shop, and who I knew from working with him previously that he was very good. He thought 'it's a new version, but no problem'. A month later, we still had nothing running and the investor/partner pulled the plug. So the swamp of poorly-documented / undocumented / mis-documented hiccoughs literally killed that startup — death by 1000 cuts.

Sure, it is probably better now, 15 years later. But so is this environment, UNLESS they tie it to another online acct.

So, basically, I'm pretty much now in the business of slinging atoms instead of bits, and the overhead is no fun, and just not worth it (yet). Plus, the overhead of working around the MS carp turned out to be pretty small. Just disable the Wireless at the right time in the W11Pro install (I think it is worse in teh Home version).

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

#402

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

Strom wrote: post #126
visarga wrote: 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.

> That's the kind of results Google should be surfacing Indeed and when I try it, it does surface it when I search for Does Nvidia Shield require an Android account? [1] For comparison, ChatGPT also gets it right. [2] -- [1] https://imgur.com/a/cLpFj6i [2] https://imgur.com/a/x6AP0jf

The first generation is 8 years old at this point.

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

#403

Post by xigoi »

skowalak wrote: post #74
asddubs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you just want to play offline, the prism launcher still lets you authenticate using the old mojang accounts. (which is not to contradict your claim, as it's not an official launcher). I held out for a really long time, but a friend wanted to play minecraft with me so I finally caved. If they ask me to add a phone number I'll probably just abandon the account though, and look into piracy of the game I purchased.

After converting, my brand new MS account got locked for 'suspicious activity' within minutes. To get back access to the game I had paid money for, I had to... you guessed it: add my phone number. Really makes me consider just not playing anymore.

Try Minetest instead. I particularly like the Mesecraft game for it.

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

#404

Post by donmcronald »

userbinator wrote: post #53

I'm assuming "deletion of your data" only includes any information that might be associated with the school... hopefully not the rest of my Microsoft account! Whenever I see such a serious warning, I will almost always take a long period of consideration before proceeding. Remember that you're dealing with a company which acts like they believe you shouldn't own your computer. If a company with that attitude believes…

It's infuriating too because they're foisting the burden of queuing / testing a backup onto the user and across the entire user base it's probably a massive amount of wasted time.

Also, Microsoft's UIs are filled with misused terminology. They use create, open, add, (delete, close, remove) etc. interchangeably. For example, in the OWA the process for removing a calendar you don't own is called delete.

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

#405

Post by rsync »

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…

"... Of course he has his important files in cloud storage anyway but it’s very annoying nonetheless ..."

That doesn't sound reassuring if the cloud storage is, itself, Microsoft connected ... or even using auth/login mechanisms that connect to the Microsoft account.

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

#406

Post by lcampbell »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #261
b800h wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The switch over the Microsoft login for Minecraft was so bad that I just gave up and got the kids using MineTest instead. And MS login for work is a complete shambles. I have to do a tactical login to Outlook with a different work account to switch login when I try to use Azure as that's the only obvious way to move to a different org account. It's horrible.

I had 2 mojang accounts for my kids, attached to 2 separate Java game licenses (because i couldn't buy 2 licenses for 1 account) used on Linux. When Microsoft forced the authentication conversion, I had to disassociate 1 of the 2 emails from the combined MS account (that I had worked really hard to combine in 2020) reincarnate that email as a separate MS account, associate it with the separate Mojang account (because…

> banned by Microsoft for breach of TOS, whatever that might have been

FWIW, I had the same thing happen and found out the ban reason was "fraud (please insert phone number)".

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

#407

Post by smoldesu »

acdha wrote: post #282
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 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. More flexible, yes, but are you really getting more powerful than an A15 for that price, especially when running a general purpose OS? That last point is really hurting why media PCs disappeared: you’re paying consider…

Performance-wise? Yeah, I bet you could. A Ryzen 5 mini PC is well under $200 and will probably have hardware acceleration for 4k60. If you're the sort of person that already has SFTP plugged into your "media backup drive", Kodi on a cheap low-power box is kinda a no-brainer.

There are certainly better push-button solutions on the market, but arguing in the AppleTV's favor for performance is probably a phyrric victory at-best. If you want an AppleTV, get an AppleTV - if you want a streaming box for your ripped Blu-Rays and legally-dumped retrogames, you can build it yourself for roughly the same price.

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

#408

Post by KallDrexx »

drdec wrote: post #305
qalmakka wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't mix up poop and chocolate - while Google's accounts aren't really that great (the whole GSuite mish-mash of nonsense doesn't really help), they are several orders of magnitude better than whatever MS is trying to do here. You have a million different ways to permanently screw yourself with a MS account, especially since they basically kept all the "account types" hidden while applying over them a veneer of homo…

> You can basically use any Google account everywhere a Google account is required This is not true if it is a Google Workspace (or whatever they are calling it now) account. Learned this the hard way when getting YouTubeTV. To be fair, it was just a couple of hours of frustration and annoyance but still, for whatever reason, the workspace accounts that you pay for are second class citizens.

I had to abandon my Google workspace account with my main email domain after they booted the free GSuite status (I migrated before they changed their mind unfortunately). Not only is that account gimped because it is a Google Workspace account (with little things all over that refuse to work with those style accounts at all) now it's even more gimped because it has no active subscription tied to it.

I can't downgrade it to a personal account without deleting the account and recreating it, but there's not even a guarantee that will work. Deleting the account will also mess up family photo albums and other items. Photo storage is full but I'm also unable to pay for storage without adding a subscription to the account. It's so risky to try and fix it that I just had to migrate to a new google account, re-purchase all my android apps, and just ignore that account forever.

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

#409

Post by coffeefirst »

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.

The solution is definitely to find someone in the school IT who can help unravel this mess.

But the fact that it's even possible to reach a failure state like this is still worth public discussion. You're probably right, odds are his daughter hit "okay" on some screen... but it shouldn't even be possible to irrevocably hand over the keys to a private account.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #399
hyperman1 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

This is exactly spot-on. 20+ years of this and you have a mess of gigantic proportions.

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