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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

#461

Post by bouke »

easton wrote: post #285
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…

Because of a quirk of my employment, my AAD account was deleted and recreated, which means I now have two Azure DevOps accounts with the same email, one of which is unlicensed (and not attached to an AAD identity). It is fairly random which one it tries to sign me in with, and every once in a while clicking on a link in ADO will sign me out because it got confused about who I was. It’s insane, and there’s no way to n…

I have the same issue. I’ve had a support call with an engineer about this and they have no idea how to fix this. If you sort the user list ascending it lists the one account and if you sort descending it lists the other. So changing the sorting should at least show _some_ license.

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

#462

Post by visarga »

rmellow wrote: post #95
ta1243 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It does. "Google search sucks" returns what you'd expect. What GP is getting at is that Google Search breaks down often when you're looking for a very specific result, but one that is uncommon enough. Instead, you're often diverted to a "related" query result without them telling you.

If you search "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?" Google would respond with swimming, boats, pedalling etc but miss the ones where people crossed on foot through the Channel Tunnel.

An improbable search is almost impossible to do on Google. They will replace it with unrelated but similar results. Even when you specify a strong condition, it will just ignore it and return the exact opposite. It's no better than LLM hallucination.

There are pairs of words that are very similar, but semantically different. Like "latitude" and "longitude" or "first name" and "last name". Google's model can't make fine distinctions between related (like latitude and longitude) and semantically equivalent (like last_name and family_name). You search for a semantic match, it will give you a related result that is exactly not matching your search.

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

#463

Post by Brian_K_White »

zamnos wrote: post #61
Brian_K_White wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft caring so little about what they do to their users IS malice.

How does that work? Is there some evil villian at Microsoft, twirling his mustache maniacally laughing himself to sleep because Mr Jeff here can't create an Azure app? This is a case for Hanlon's razor.

For every policy and priority there is one or more humans somewhere who decided them. They aren't sourceless and ineffectable natural phenomenon like the weather. A person somewhere knowingly decided them, and continued to do so in the face of plenty of argument. It doesn't require Ming the Merciless mustaches, it only requires normal differences in priorities.

One wonders why one would pretend not to know this.

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

#464

Post by ta1243 »

mannykannot wrote: post #347
ta1243 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the business case for that?

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

#466

Post by mindslight »

tacker2000 wrote: post #460
acdha wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it not more cost effective and better performing AND nore flexible than an Nvidia shield or similar? Im not talking about Chromecasts here.

IMO there's this weird tendency for technologists to create a model of "normies" with no bespoke interests or self-actualization, and then argue that they're following fully-fleshed-out "normie" incentives rather than the actuality of advertising and product placement.

Also I find it a bit disingenuous when people argue for the "less expensive" options that put you at the mercy of streaming companies. My amd64+Kodi+zfs+VPN setup certainly isn't the cheapest, but neither is a corporate puck with several monthly fees for streaming services. If one wanted to be entertained for the least money possible, I suspect that would just consist of using your current laptop/computer running a general purpose OS to play dodgy streaming sites. But most people seemingly want something more than that (which ties back in to my first paragraph).

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

#467

Post by Hizonner »

jackmott42 wrote: post #328
roywashere wrote: post #292

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…

security is getting to be worse than what is protects against. its a daily bane, especially for work stuff as everything is locked down extra hard they tried to simplify it by tying everything to yubi keys, but just this week some things stopped going to the yubikey and wanted me to auth on my phone like we used to instead. ugh

Letting an organization grab control of resources that do not belong to it, without the consent of the actual owners of those resources, is not "security".

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

#468

Post by oarsinsync »

ta1243 wrote: post #73
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.

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

Why does an Android TV device requiring a Google account paint Google in a bad light?

If I’m all-in on the Google/Android ecosystem, this is a positive! It works even better!

The alternative is that the people behind the Nvidia Shield are intentionally user hostile / acting with malice, in cooperation with Google?

The idea that the account requirement is positive or negative is a hugely subjective one. The fact is it’s needed. Whether it’s positive or negative is largely irrelevant. The fact should be surfaced.

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

#469

Post by oarsinsync »

mindslight wrote: post #466
tacker2000 wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not more cost effective and better performing AND nore flexible than an Nvidia shield or similar? Im not talking about Chromecasts here.

IMO there's this weird tendency for technologists to create a model of "normies" with no bespoke interests or self-actualization, and then argue that they're following fully-fleshed-out "normie" incentives rather than the actuality of advertising and product placement. Also I find it a bit disingenuous when people argue for the "less expensive" options that put you at the mercy of streaming companies. My amd64+Kodi+z…

As a technologist who’s run a fully fledged media PC since the days of Xbox Media Centre (before XBMC or Kodi or even Plex I think) with both Windows and Linux flavours, along with a USB IR remote control and wireless keyboard options… I simply got fed up of things randomly not working every year or two when a major upgrade was required, and the amount of effort that typically became required at the exact point that I was exhausted and just wanted to relax.

So I gave in, switched to Plex, paid for a Plexpass lifetime account, and bought embedded devices that could stream content off my server.

I have way less flexibility now that I’m on an AppleTV 4K. I also continue to get occasional headaches (e.g. recently the remote control randomly stops being able to control the volume), but the size of the headache is limited to pulling out a different remote control / turning all the things off and on again. Mental effort not required.

I have a laptop that goes into the 4x2 HDMI splitter, and I occasionally whip that out if there’s a real desperate need. But it’s the absolute last resort. It’s just easier to use the ATV.

It’s not that I lack the ability to produce a better PC based solution today, it’s that I lack the interest, and the $200 ATV is good enough that I’d rather throw money at the problem than time.

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

#470

Post by smolder »

lcampbell wrote: post #406
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)".

MS also banned me from playing Halo Infinite after a few days due to "Fraud (please insert phone number)" even though I'd done absolutely nothing suspicious --just played the game. So, naturally I deleted it and haven't looked back.
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