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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

#421

Post by goosedragons »

alasdair_ wrote: post #411
andrepd wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sort of OK if they still leave a relatively trivial backdoor to do this, but if they ever flat require an online account, I'm out, hard Sounds like a huge pain to deal with. Why not switch to Linux and be done with it? Genuine question.

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.

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

#422

Post by barbazoo »

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…

This gave me flashbacks I was happy to forget about. Microsoft's SSO is nuts, at least with the browsers I used at the time. Might work better with Edge.

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

#423

Post by trinsic2 »

katbyte wrote: post #416
trinsic2 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's dark patterns philosophy and how that translates into real-world user experiences is the worst I have ever seen. And since they are implementing these dark patterns into the OS it has the potential to make using Windows very difficult. I understand that, with knowledge, you can get around that.. But I dont see why anyone would want to any more. Apple is really bad too, but there not as bad in the dark pat…

What are the ramifications of apples “end-user hostile decisions” aside from the walled garden on iOS? And having to click security -> run anyway for unsigned apps?

I think how their approach to usability and security actually translates to a lack of user-freedom. We had a discussion recently about activation lock on hackernews. On paper and in the world of security, its a great mechanism to prevent theft. But it also causes friction for device re-use with people that don't understand they need to decouple their online identity from their device, this has a negative impact on recycling. It also seems like Apple wants to herd people into purchasing new devices sooner than they should, when the should be doing all they can to make devices last.

This is also related to trying to control the circulation of replacement parts by attempting to force independent repair centers to regulate how parts are distributed. Apple takes more of a "You don't know what you are doing, so we have to guide you in the right direction" approach that doesn't sit too well with me. Apple can be wrong, a lot, about how their decisions effects people's freedom to decide how to implement there own security and ways of retiring devices. Apple should be in the business of making hardware and making it usable. Not being a parent, deciding how people are going to use and secure their devices. Maybe leaving that to an impartial organization that works with apple. Too many conflicts of interest for me.

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

#424

Post by dicknuckle »

Meph504 wrote: post #202
theK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

They have actually made a lot of improvements to this process recently allowing for multi tenant login in a single browser. If you use firefox, you can use each other the container types to host different login accounts, it makes it easier than switching between private windows and doesn't require you to enable extensions on your private tabs

Container tabs with MS and AWS has been a huge help for me at work.

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

#425

Post by mindslight »

acdha wrote: post #282
tacker2000 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at a media center/gaming emulation device and to be honest i dont see the benefit of these android based TV devices or Apple TV anymore. 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.

> 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 doing the same mutable update dance behind the scenes (with the added complication of corporate whims).

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

#426

Post by AtlasBarfed »

theK wrote: post #42
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…

Yeah, the identity side of MS products is really dysfunctional. Every time I try to use teams or azure it ends up in hours of finding out the right procedure to log in or switch an account effectively. And then you get the people asking naively "why are you getting so mad at them"...

This is a buyer beware of some security policies.

I just want to point out that this entire described scenario, by a company with decades and decades of security products being shoehorned into "just good enough" cloud infrastructure....

Sure the security folks will say hardened infrastructure with fine grained least privilege is doable ... if you're at greenfield ... maybe. But the issue with lots of IT orgs is that they are MESSY, and fine grained least privilege is fragile. Messy + fragile = not good things.

I agree with least privilege as an aspiration, but security is a top-down authoritarian entity in organizations, and fundamentally they don't care if their policies disrupt your daily work process. IMO this is because most security orgs don't provide solutions.

Specifically, by solution I do not mean "picked an enterprise security product bam we have a solution", I mean you have a security architecture and then have the people with bandwidth to help boots on ground devs get the job done quickly so security isn't a blocker).

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

#427

Post by Groxx »

roywashere wrote: post #292
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…

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…

Bitlocker is such a freaking user-hostile mess. I know what I'm doing with it and I still screw it up - I have no idea how non-technical people are supposed to have any idea what's going on. They're either totally unprotected or constantly at risk of losing everything even with professional help.

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

#428

Post by teddyh »

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…

> Now the corporate infighting starts

Typical for Microsoft, reportedly: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

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

#429

Post by roywashere »

rsync wrote: post #405
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…

"... Of course he has his important files in cloud storage anyway but it’s very annoying nonetheless ..." That doesn't sound reassuring if the cloud storage is, itself, Microsoft connected ... or even using auth/login mechanisms that connect to the Microsoft account.

It is Google Drive, actually

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

#430

Post by linuxhansl »

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 code. Did not fix it.

6. Called MS again, this time they said to reinstall Windows (This is not a joke).

7. Upon re-installing, Windows would not activate. No error message, no nothing it would just hang in the activation loop.

8. Called MS. They had no clue. Claimed H/W issues.

9. Called manufacturer again. Also claimed H/W issues. I said that I can access the internet from the machine while it was hanging in activation, so network was not the problem.

10. Manufacturer sent someone out (I had bought warranty). He switched the SSD with a new version of Windows... The did exactly what I did. Same problem, would not activate.

11. Some back and forth with MS and the manufacturer involving many reboot and (I kid you not) turning off all wireless routers... MS still would not activate. Manufacturer (and MS) did not believe me. So they sent someone again. Did the same thing, again. Did not work.

12. Manufacturer said I needed to send in the machine. So I did. I included a note about what the problem and to please not just re-install Windows, because the activation was the problem.

13. Got the machine back... They had just re-installed Windows. Would not activate.

14. Started to get upset. After some pressing manufacturer agreed to send a new machine.

15. First they sent someone out again. Did the same thing again. Forced me, again, to turn all wireless routers off, so that (he claimed) Windows would activate without network. Again... Did not work. Activation just hung.

16. Eight weeks into this we ended up getting a new machine (yes, not kidding) from the manufacturer and now the same version of Windows (from the same memory stick) on the same hardware, same drivers, all the same, would happily register.

I cannot even begin to express how annoying and useless this was. And MS and manufacturer were helpless and useless.

Personally I have stopped use Windows over 2 decades ago - only using Linux, but my son wanted a gaming machine, and so I relented. :)

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