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Microsoft became incompetent in IT

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Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#91

Post by mikekaganski »

charcircuit wrote: post #86
mikekaganski wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you obviously didn't read it. It writes exactly "OK, they have a stupid AI that is worse than good old filters. OK, they made it react immediately, as an undoubted authority. But that’s not a big problem, right? They provide a way to appeal! Let me do that." If you say that it's not a depiction of what someone thinks and does facing something, you just need to improve reading skills. And basically that wasn't some…

It was an unnecessary comment to include in the article in my opinion. It doesn't affect the overall story, is potentially libelous, and trivializes the complexity of fighting abuse at scale. I agree it's irrelevant. It makes 0 sense to me to include unless it's backed in truth.

Irrelevant is "lack of references when one describes some reactions", not "this is what I thought, when I faced that; and I described my thoughts and feelings in a post of mine in my own blog dedicated to my thoughts and feelings".

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#92

Post by ttiurani »

crocowhile wrote: post #73

It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account an…

As a bonus, you can can get completely stuck if you made the mistake of creating a MS family when signing into Minecraft. In the forums there are hundreds of problems like mine where the family becomes completely uneditable and Minecraft offline-only.

But I should've never attempted anything that complicated with MS. They can barely manage simple cases, groups of users is way too hard.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#93

Post by jkkola »

kalleboo wrote: post #50

All of the tech giants have really broken account recovery flows. They've all been glomming on recovery options, single sign-on, 2FA, etc features and none of it is coherent, with lots of dead ends where the optional recovery option it suggests isn't actually supported. Amazon has a lot of issues with accounts shared between their national storefronts. I lost a Google account that owns a YouTube channel since it want…

I just wanted to say that's equally impressive and terrifying. Good job though!

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#94

Post by II2II »

eviks wrote: post #40

> But this, once an IT tech leader, became utterly incompetent in IT. And for me, it’s a pity. The rose tint is strong in these glasses. When was their support great? Or is the author simply confused about what tech they were a lead in?

I can't speak for Microsoft since I've never dealt with them directly, but descriptions of the level of support offered to consumers in the eighties and early nineties would be beyond belief to those who didn't live through it. You would dial a toll-free number, talk to a real person who would diagnose the problem and fix it. If it was a known fixed bug, they would mail you a software update. If the bug didn't have a fix, there was still a chance it would be fixed in the current version. At least my experience with Corel, IBM, and, WordPerfect were all like that. How the companies could afford that level of support is beyond me.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#95

Post by charcircuit »

mikekaganski wrote: post #91
charcircuit wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an unnecessary comment to include in the article in my opinion. It doesn't affect the overall story, is potentially libelous, and trivializes the complexity of fighting abuse at scale. I agree it's irrelevant. It makes 0 sense to me to include unless it's backed in truth.

Irrelevant is "lack of references when one describes some reactions", not "this is what I thought, when I faced that; and I described my thoughts and feelings in a post of mine in my own blog dedicated to my thoughts and feelings".

Fair. I could have raised skepticism of the claim without including the reference to references. But I wanted to make my comment longer, and the bit about references was mentioned the sentence before the sentence before the claim.

I also now realize that you are likely the author of the article that was posted, so I will wish you luck in resolving your account issues.

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#96

Post by velocity3230 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #72

I remember a time long ago when Microsoft support was great. I had a problem with Windows 3.11 crashing on my computer. Called the free telephone support, and the person went through a rigorous unscripted troubleshooting session with me to finally find the problem. Turned out some dram timing was slightly of in the bios setting which was only tripped by Windows and not by other software. That was in the 80's.

Windows 3.11 was released in 1993.

Don't mess with the timeline, Marty!

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#98

Post by waste_monk »

danlitt wrote: post #88
waste_monk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that google's (lack of) customer support is awful. >it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification However, this isn't quite fair on google - it's not arbitrary "sometimes", it's that accounts get locked if there's been unusual or suspicious activity that may indicate an atte…

I think this is quite fair criticism of google. The idea of the account being locked and requiring MFA to verify is something they made up without consulting the user. If they're going to do this "suspicious account" locking, they must make MFA mandatory beforehand. If they haven't got MFA from the user, they must trust the password. If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem. Note that there is no…

> If they're going to do this "suspicious account" locking, they must make MFA mandatory beforehand.

This should probably be the case - I am not a big fan of passkeys [1] but hopefully this will help make non-SMS, phishing resistant MFA available to the masses.

Still, Google are in a difficult position where on the one hand they have people angry about being locked out, and yet if they didn't they would have people angry about their accounts being compromised.

> If that means my account gets compromised, that's my problem.

It is also the problem of everyone on your contacts list, the operators of other services which use Google OAuth for login, anyone who might recieve spam from your compromised account, and so on.

Reducing harm by temporarily restricting the account when heuristics indicate it may be compromised is not unreasonable IMO.

>Note that there is no question who owns the account. That's what the password is for!

This is unfortunately not as true as we would like it to be.

Have a look at the list of compromised services on Have I Been Pwned [2] - not all of these include passwords, and many that do would be hashed (and hopefully salted) rather than plaintext, but it still happens often enough to be of great concern.

[1] WebAuthN / Passkey technology is fine in the general sense, and I am quite happy to use it with a hardware security key (such a Yubikey or Titan) or emulated in a password manager.

However I think the recent push towards having it tied to a TPM on a device such as a phone is a bit short-sighted, simply because these devices are prone to being lost or damaged. If you set up passkey MFA on the phone and don't enrol a backup method, then lose your phone, you have also lost the account. Probably these services should require 2+ MFA methods configured.

[2] https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites

Re: Microsoft became incompetent in IT

#99

Post by sam_lowry_ »

random3 wrote: post #52
chrismorgan wrote: post #20

This kind of issue is absurdly common. I’ve seen basically the same thing with Microsoft, Amazon and Google—personally and with others. With Google, it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification… which may not be possible. This hit me once while overseas, I think I managed to get in by…

Exactly! The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this. In fact, the internal support - i.e. the support for employees is just as bad and nonsensical. It goes pretty much like this. If your problem needs “reasoning” that entails more than matching a direct solution, you’re getting the default answer that’s the closest match to the solution. The onl…

Nexus by Yuval Harari covers bureaucracy in the same vein.
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