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My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account

jeffgeerling.com

441–450 of 490 posts

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

#441
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to use the official launcher that requires online connection to play the game you own (twice), right?

You can still use unofficial launchers, but I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft removes that too

You can't use any unofficial launcher that lets you play the game unless it talks to Microsoft servers about it.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the sources I can find say that Enterprise G is China-only. The US Government (among others) doesn’t use it, even for classified stuff.

Telemetry is a bit of a non-issue for many national security applications-they run on special air-gapped networks with zero direct access to the public Internet, Windows can try to phone home to Microsoft all day long, it’ll never get through.

And disabling telemetry doesn’t require LTSC or Enterprise G. All Enterprise, Education and Server editions support “Diagnostic data off” telemetry level. Even if that’s not the default, most enterprises who want that will build their own install images with that setting configured.

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

#443
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did those 500 users also happen to be the ones that weren’t adequately supported because they were seen as problem children? If my org doesn’t give me a supported way to do absolutely necessary thing X, then I’ll find my own way to do it.

As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.

While it is entirely possible the problem here is those execs, devs and bioinformaticians. There do seem to be many other common factors than the macs here.

Maybe they all need nonstandard software? God forbid, maybe they need administration permissions, but the org doesn’t want to give it to them, so they end up calling in every other day to get something unlocked (I know that’d be true for me).

Maybe it’s the problem solving skills of the IT team when it comes to mac, so people keep coming back with the same issues (good ones are Outlook/Teams being permanently broken, or VPN not connecting).

On the whole, I’d steer away from any explanation that would require all 500 mac users to be idiots.

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

#444
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible UI if you can do a fundamental account change without some kind of password re-confirmation.

saved in the browser

Yeah, I realize it was just a continued session, but that's exactly what I mean. For things like password changes or privilege changes, there should always be a mandatory re-auth to make sure it's not someone else at keys.

This is pretty much just best practice. When's the last time you could change your password without entering the original, short of a re-verification via email? Same idea here.

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

#445
post #434

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. 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 particula…

Look, I’m not saying you can’t use a PC for a TV if you want. I was specifically responding to the assertion that it was both cost-competitive and better performing when neither is true. It certainly allows you to do different things but it’s unclear how many people care about those more than the extra cash.

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

#446
At my previous employer, a mid-size company that used a lot of Microsoft products, my team had a developer intern go the ENTIRE SUMMER without access to Azure DevOps (source code, CI/CD, etc...) because he got some weird error when he tried to sign in. His account was cursed or something. Microsoft support apparently couldn't fix it. Our administrators couldn't fix it. Dozens of hours were burned on this issue, and I think he ended up just coding at someone else's computer since we pair programmed most of the time. The funny part is he joined another team full-time later on; they must have finally resolved it somehow.

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

#448

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…

The org chart comic from its original source, instead of a random reupload captioned in Spanish and heavy on the image artifacts: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are the main reason for me. I want max performance on my high end gaming pc and I want all the things to just work, including 7.1 surround sound (and atmos later) and HDR and gsync and all my accessories and all the anticheat etc. I know valve have done great stuff but is it good enough yet to run everything on a AAA game on 4k ultra with hdr, gsync and 144hz?

HDR no (although it's progressing). 4K Ultra, gsync and 144Hz on a AAA game, yes. Anti-cheat is going to continue being a problem so long as Microsoft allows these kernel level things and devs keep doing it.

Looks like Valve are actively working on HDR support https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-working-on-hdr-for-linux-gami...

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

#450
post #294

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.

Agree. I also shy away from using google or ms oath for third party services. Partly due to privacy but partly paranoid concerns like this
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