My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by x0x0 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

hyperman1 wrote: post #229

ashgoyal wrote: post #180

This is a giant mess. Frankly, i don't understand how they architected it. If i open a word, excel or ppt document from another companies SharePoint because they added me as a guest, Microsoft promptly signs me out of the desktop office 365 apps and then says that i am using unlicensed office365. How was this missed when designing the security and authentication systems?? This is basic foundational stuff!

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…

And it's crucial to understand we're well past the point where any one (or likely even a small team) knows all the places that Microsoft auth is entangled with. Thus unknown, undesirable interactions occur just because it's too big for someone to know that the interaction would occur.

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

#432

Post by gessha » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:30 PM UTC

linuxhansl wrote: post #430

That happened to us, and what followed was a 8 week nightmare. 1. My son's school MS account took over his private account, only because he linked the two accounts. 2. Suddenly my son's Windows said it was un-authorized. 3. We called Microsoft, they could not fix it. 4. We called the manufacturer of the machine (they shipped Windows as OEM). They could not fix it. 5. Called MS again. They gave us a new activation cod…

Have you heard of our lord and savior, Proton

It might not work for some of the multiplayer games that youngins play although it might work.

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

#433

Post by acdha » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #407

acdha wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 victor…

> Ryzen 5 mini PC is well under $200 and will probably have hardware acceleration for 4k60.

The cheapest one Google knows about is an AliExpress no-name brand at $159 and that’s because it includes no storage or RAM, and uses a 3750H which benchmarks at less than half the speed. Once you add memory, it’s over $200. It does match the Apple TV on 4K@60 HDR support so I’d assume it must have hardware support.

Amazon has a couple of off-brand Intel devices, also around $200 for around half the Apple device’s performance.

Again, if you really want a PC you certainly can make it work but the reason it’s unpopular is that you’re paying a lot more – this is starting at 150% for hardware which is unlikely to last as long – and you then have to support a full PC, buy remotes, etc. If you enjoy that as a hobby, sure, but it’s hardly surprising that most people buy something which just works out of the box.

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

#434

Post by acdha » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:50 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #425

acdha wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There exist general purposes OSes that don't just fall apart randomly, you know. For instance if I have a problem with my Kodi box, I just reboot and choose the previous generation in the NixOS boot menu. Judging by the threads on those proprietary embedded devices, I think my setup passes the "just works when you want it to" test even better than those appliance things, which market an illusion of stability but are…

> There exist general purposes OSes that don't just fall apart randomly, you know. For instance if I have a problem with my Kodi box, I just reboot and choose the previous generation in the NixOS boot menu.

As someone who started using desktop Linux and supported it professionally before the turn of the century, yes, I’m aware and you’ll note that I never claimed otherwise. The reason I mentioned general purpose operating systems is that they’re not optimized for non-keyboard/mouse UI and you’re more likely to get in a situation which requires more work to sort out via the CLI.

The other concern I raised was drivers. Support for hardware video decoding, colorspaces & depth, high-quality sound, etc. is certainly technically possible but also something which not-uncommonly ends with angry rants. If you are passionate about open source and eager to take on that responsibility, great, but it’s not a popular choice.

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

#435

Post by Meph504 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

mkup wrote: post #271

skissane wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about LTSC or something else? I have looked into buying LTSC. Apparently you need a business (I own a “shelf” company which has never done anything, but legally it counts), and a Microsoft volume license agreement. I looked into the later. Supposedly there is this trick where you order all these useless-but-cheap Identity Manager CALs to cheaply meet the minimum order requirement for a volume license.…

I am not Meph504, but I suppose they meant either Windows Enterprise G or Windows Enterprise G N editions, not Windows LTSC editions.

Correct

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

#436

Post by Meph504 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #384

mkup wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not Meph504, but I suppose they meant either Windows Enterprise G or Windows Enterprise G N editions, not Windows LTSC editions.

Is Enterprise G the same thing as “China Government Edition”? Is there a “US Government Edition”? Is it different from the Chinese one? How does G differ from LTSC?

Yes it is different, and the difference between gov edition and ltsc is that. The gov edition isn't designed for long term support without change, but to increase security of windows and remove all the telemry and forced integrated services from Microsoft.

This info is publicly available so more detailed info should be easy to find.

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

#437

Post by Tronno » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

My limited personal experience with Microsoft accounts mirrors the anecdotes elsewhere in the thread.

HOWEVER, the article glosses over the real story: a child obtained complete, unsupervised access to the author's computer, and wouldn't you know it, they broke something.

I suspect there would be far less interest if the headline read "my kid ordered $20k worth of Robux and I can't get a refund".

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

#438

Post by Meph504 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

scott00 wrote: post #288

Meph504 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you give more details on the "1 TB per user pool for shared office resources"? I always thought there was a user-level limit of 1 TB for OneDrive, and a organization-level limit of 1 TB + (10 GB)*(number of users) for Sharepoint.[0] And I've never found any documentation as to whether shared OneDrive folders count against the owner's quota, all of the users with permissions quota, or the sharepoint quota. [0] htt…

Firstly this is complex, it depends on what plans and tiers you have, your resell partner, and what region you are in.

But the basics each user gets their own quota of 1 to 5tb,then there is also a shared quota (share point, Ms group storage, powershell online environment, dataverse, etc... ) of 1 to 25tb + (x size per user) the size per user depends on a multitude of factors.

I did not mean to imply that users limits are connected to the shared pool, it is in addition to the user quotas.

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

#439

Post by tmpz22 » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

b800h wrote: post #49

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…

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 a pre-alpha (beta?) Minecraft account that I had to give up on due to this.

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

#440

Post by mindslight » Sat, Feb 25, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #434

mindslight wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exist general purposes OSes that don't just fall apart randomly, you know. For instance if I have a problem with my Kodi box, I just reboot and choose the previous generation in the NixOS boot menu. Judging by the threads on those proprietary embedded devices, I think my setup passes the "just works when you want it to" test even better than those appliance things, which market an illusion of stability but are…

> There exist general purposes OSes that don't just fall apart randomly, you know. For instance if I have a problem with my Kodi box, I just reboot and choose the previous generation in the NixOS boot menu. As someone who started using desktop Linux and supported it professionally before the turn of the century, yes, I’m aware and you’ll note that I never claimed otherwise. The reason I mentioned general purpose oper…

The focus of those points feels completely irrelevant to the reality of my using a general PC to drive my TV. They seem to simultaneously assume the use of a generic point and click operating environment, while rejecting the additional functionality that would necessitate doing so.

My Kodi box boots straight into Kodi. I have a mini wireless keyboard on it (Rii X8?), but the alphanumeric functionality isn't particularly used and it could just as easily be a video game controller or even an IR remote.

There is no "situation which requires more work to sort out via the CLI", beyond when I deliberately choose to make changes to the system. If I ever did want to pop out of Kodi and run a general desktop + browser - say for sports streams - then the additional input hassle would be due to doing something I couldn't do with an appliance anyway. You can't really characterize this as a drawback.

And sure if some driver functionality doesn't exist, then obviously you can't use it - you set your expectations to what is available and how much you want to tinker. And the real answer to "angry rants" is to use an operating system with reliable change control, so that if you start tinkering with something, it cannot end up in a broken state when you want to use it to relax.