This is potentially illegal hacking by the letter of the law. You can have a lawyer send a restraining order, and if they don't fix this take it to court. Of course they will then be forced to in turn sue Microsoft, who may discover the court orders all auth turned off until they can fix this.
My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
391–400 of 490 posts
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#392Despite the implication of malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft, this just seems like a bit of an oversight (i.e. inexperience) on behalf of the school’s IT team. Nonetheless, I would have expected MS to ensure that the process includes clearer guidance for the account owner, and for deliberate decisions to be made by the school to enable this type of action. They did a very good job of provid…
Yes, it's confusing that the UI doesn't highlight that "Jeff's MSA" and "Jeff's MSA at This School" are different accounts when it makes statements about the school owning the account. By adding him, the school set up a "Jeff at This School" account (a unique ID inside their Azure Active Directory) which Jeff can access using his MSA account. They didn't take any ownership over his MSA, but they do control the data for his school account (i.e. anything he creates in their Azure Portal, SharePoint, etc.)
And then Jeff is confused about the state of his account. Keep in mind that he's using a developer tool (the Azure portal) and account federation is not a beginner-level feature of Azure AD. There are sharp edges. He just jumped to a lot of conclusions and wow the Fud level on this comments thread is off the charts.
I know this because I set up an OAuth2 based web portal for my friends to access my Minecraft server using Azure AD B2C and by god the hardest part was figuring out how to explain the login experience to users, and disable the secondary 2FA requirements for MSA/Gmail users (because I know my friends are smart enough to use 2FA)
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to support Windows, but what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day? I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time so I don't have to reopen 5 different windows and arrange them across three screens for uni work every evening. It works fine. Mind you, if it was a Mac I'd not even have to reopen or arrange them after restarting the machine - they'd still be there.…
> what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day? Outlook, Teams, Chrome, COMRAD (radiology RIS), Spotify and InteleViewer (DICOM viewer). Without restarts Spotify stops working, the software loses track of what day it is (it assumes the day prior) and things get slow or unresponsive. Maybe it’s the software and not the OS. I run all those except COMRAD on a Mac ok though. Mac and multi display and…
"My applications, not written by Microsoft, are broken. Obviously, it's Windows fault".
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
I witnessed an egregious bug once - where logging in with one users name and a different users 2FA let me in. I just looked for my notes on it and can’t find them. I’m happy for you not to take my word on it other than to say — I concur that there are some egregious bugs in this area!
I completely believe you - I have performed this setup twice, on different machines, and in both cases the end result is that it uses the kids PIN to authenticate despite requesting the adult's PIN. I have no idea where to report the issue to (Microsoft store? Minecraft support? Microsoft Windows support?), and having dealt with Microsoft support in a professional capacity I know that even if I do figure out where to…
> result is that it uses the kids PIN to authenticate despite requesting the adult's PIN
That's been a thing for a long time. I hit it when trying to share games with child accounts. IIRC, the high level process was:
- Set up child computer with a child account.
- Add parent account as family member on child computer.
- Set up a PIN for the parent account on the child computer.
- On the child OS account, open the Windows Store and log in as the parent.
- Log back in to the Windows Store using the child account.
When I ran into the issue, I could buy anything I wanted with the child PIN and it bypassed all restrictions.
I was so surprised by the way it worked that I spent an entire afternoon testing it. I got a prepaid credit card, set up fresh MS accounts for the parent + child, set up a clean OS install, and recorded everything using VirtualBox by using the on-screen keyboard to show the PINs.
At the time there was a bug in VirtualBox's video recording that caused it to record random garbage and I got so frustrated that I set it aside and never went back to it.
It seems like an auth bypass issue to me and it's been a problem for over 7 years. It's been around so long it's even made it's way from an unofficial blog into official MS docs [1]:
> As of Dec 25 2015, there seems to be a bug in the Windows Store sign in process as it may ask for your PIN code but it actually wants your family member’s PIN code. That is, at least at the time of this writing, use the PIN of the signed in family member even though it asks for your PIN!
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/henrikn/shar...
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day? Outlook, Teams, Chrome, COMRAD (radiology RIS), Spotify and InteleViewer (DICOM viewer). Without restarts Spotify stops working, the software loses track of what day it is (it assumes the day prior) and things get slow or unresponsive. Maybe it’s the software and not the OS. I run all those except COMRAD on a Mac ok though. Mac and multi display and…
Yea I dont support Microsoft either but I do have to run it on multipule machines for work and I don't need to restart unless to switch into Linux. It sounds like one of your apps has a memory leak or something. Do you check task manager for resource hogging?
> Do you check task manager for resource hogging?
Awkward… no, I haven’t dug into it at all. I now will.
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that Windows 11 and above (try very hard to) require a Microsoft account, because these orcas of computing want to remind you with every step that you don't own the device you bought. Hence it's simpler/better to just virtualize everything. Besides, there is a very satisfactory feeling when something doesn't work for whatever reason, you do a quick search and see that apparently you must edit some awfu…
> The problem is that Windows 11 and above require a Microsoft account It is not quite a requirement, I have my Windows 11 Pro running just fine with no Microsoft account. They do attempt really hard to make it look like it's required though. Even going as far as showing a fullscreen app after Windows update that only has options for registering or login, but luckily Alt+F4 closes that abomination.
I believe, Microsoft account is a requirement for Home editions, not Pro or above.
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to support Windows, but what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day? I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time so I don't have to reopen 5 different windows and arrange them across three screens for uni work every evening. It works fine. Mind you, if it was a Mac I'd not even have to reopen or arrange them after restarting the machine - they'd still be there.…
> I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time My Win10 Home desktop downloads updates when I'm not looking - and sometimes when I'm actually using the thing - and then reboots all on its own. I have no control over this; there have been occasions when the reboot has happened while I was working. It happens roughly once a week.
I've been using this method for years and it works great. It uses a windows debug feature to launch cmd instead of the reboot scheduler. You never see the cmd window, as it's launched by SYSTEM. This prevents Windows update from scheduling a reboot, otherwise the system function as normal. You do need to reboot periodically, but now it's on your schedule.
Source: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same story here. Thought it would be great for kids to play. Takes 30 minutes of me screwing with it every time they want to play it. I gave up and put linux on an old laptop and them bought another copy of minecraft for it.
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
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#399This 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…
This is exactly spot-on. 20+ years of this and you have a mess of gigantic proportions.
Re: My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solution: run Windows in a VM, one machine per account, nuke it from orbit when-not-if something goes awry. Hundreds of hours of frustration prevented from a system that is not even able to have the same UI across all its windows.
Or run apps like Teams in a web browser. Web browsers have good isolation techniques like Chrome's profiles and Firefox's containers. Teams is written using web technologies so you're getting the same experience as the app.
This doesn't work perfectly well if you are on multiple calls at the same time.
Desktop Teams allows you to join multiple calls at once, and switch between them is easy.
Web browser teams disconnects you from one meeting to join another. The only solution is to open multiple browser profiles, each for different call, and then manage the 'mute tab' manually. Additionally, web browser edition has something to detect if tab is active, and will downscale / delay video stream if tab is not active. This is extremely annoying when you have meeting active on one monitor, and want to double check what is being discussed on another.
Saying all this, web browser teams at least works. Desktop one stops working because as the whole discussion here points out, accounts get mixed up. I can't join team meetings anonymously because desktop edition thinks I have an account, but when I try to login it tells me my account doesn't have Teams enabled.