Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#771

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

tripzilch wrote: post #751

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product. I think this is worth thinking about for a bit. The trope is that if you're not paying then you're the product. But it doesn't follow that if you are paying you are not the product. That depends entirely on business decisions that customers have little visibility into. For any product you pay for, there may eventually be a decision to extract additional reven…

As someone in another thread mentioned, it's because the marketing budgets are way bigger than what people would, or even could, pay. Whichever corporations are paying for these revenue streams of monetized data and attention, they can (and do) easily outbid whatever a human customer is willing or able to pay for software or services that don't track you. It's pretty obvious when you think about it. All the incentive…

> They can just make you pay for the service AND extract your data and track you.

Indeed. When cable TV started, it didn't have advertising. The premise was that you were paying for the service, so they didn't have to show you ads. That situation lasted as long as ice cream in the Nevada sun. Cell companies were capitalizing on tracking data we were providing them -- despite the high cost of cell service -- long before the general public got wise. Microsoft just took longer to get to the same idea.

Microsoft is going to double down on this, and make the consumer version "free" by way of explicit advertising. If they lose customers, they won't care. They've got corporations around the globe by the short hairs for at least another generation. Maybe two. They've been losing the consumer space for years, and they're just going to ride it all the way into the ground.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#772

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #759

rovr138 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could buy a really good screen with no “smart” software at all. I can plug an Xbox if I want, or a shield, or a Roku, or an Amazon fire stick/tv, or an Apple TV, or a chrome cast Just add a bunch of ports and KISS. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

What about not simply enabling wifi connection on the tv? My few year old sony tv is the dumbest possible secondary pc monitor, with great screen quality. I couldn't care less about any of those apps, I have vastly superior PC for those if needed.

This is a dangerous argument to rely on, because it still allows for devices to phone home via independent means. Just as your new car may well have some sort of embedded mobile network access today, so your TV may come with a built-in SIM, or use some kind of mesh network that doesn't rely on your own home WiFi access.

The problem is the principle that it's OK for your devices to monitor you at all without your explicit knowledge and consent -- or even with those things, if the market leaves no reasonable alternative and so the consent isn't really consent at all.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

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Post by amaccuish » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #685

amaccuish wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like you cannot have your macOS password be the same as your Apple ID password. Huh, yes you can? http://osxdaily.com/2015/03/24/use-icloud-password-as-mac-lo...

That's not exactly discoverable. Try a clean install of a Mac without having previously enabled this feature. You are prompted for your Apple ID and password, then to make a Mac account. If you use the same password for both, the OS won't let you. I didn't know you could later enable it.

> That's not exactly discoverable

Sure it's not. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist/is not possible :)

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

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Post by ectospheno » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #11

mentos wrote: post #2

“They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet. Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account.”

That's a pretty clear dark pattern, no? At the very least, it signals that Microsoft really doesn't want users creating offline accounts. Which is troubling, because their TOS for online accounts is quite onerous, and includes a couple of problematic restrictions, including a mandatory arbitration agreement. If I was a Windows user who relied on local accounts this would be very worrying to me.

You always install windows without a network connection so that you can run group policy editor to install your policies before first network connection. This has been best practice forever.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#775

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #705

anoncake wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would not expect home users to know That's why MS renamed the button. > or care They do, else MS would not need those dark patterns.

> They do, else MS would not need those dark patterns. No, typical end users do not care what “domain join” means. They only care about creating offline accounts. “Domain join” isn’t supposed to mean “create offline account”, it’s supposed to let you join the computer to an AD domain. Or at least, that’s what I’d expect.

Users don't care about "offline account" either. (What does that mean to a user, they can't access the internet any more?) Same with the previous term before that, "local account", had no meaning to most "typical" end users for about the same reason.

Some of this I guess is semi-intentional dark patterns [1], but it's also a complex space where explaining the trade-offs to "typical" end users would involve a ton of wasted space and increasingly local/offline accounts aren't what a "typical" end user wants, because they aren't an IT Admin and don't understand the trade-offs and probably don't care to. Given no one seems to have a good name for them other than "offline accounts" or "local accounts", which would imply "can't connect to the internet" to "typical" end users, it's hard not to feel that it really probably is a Power User feature and it's as much an unintentional dark pattern simply because we don't have a good name for it and no one wants to explain the trade-offs to "typical" end users.

[1] Though I'm more willing than most to ascribe at least some good intentions to it: settings synchronization is more useful to typical end users than local sandboxes and devices that don't roam basic settings. The ability to recover logging into a device when a user forgets a password is also a huge necessary deal in 2019 because passwords are broken and typical end users have far too many of them. Microsoft also wants to kill the password as a thing in lieu of other factors. Getting end users out of daily password input would be good for us an industry.

(Yes, yes, I know the next three commenters will complain that it's all just for telemetry and surveillance, and I understand where y'all are coming from, but you are also not-quite-correct and it's a debate I'm tired of. Windows 10 has been increasingly better at allowing you to explore all of its telemetry collection and better with each update at providing tools for opting out of individual telemetry. Windows 10 and macOS/iOS are at the same levels of telemetry collection and accountability of such today. The telemetry debate is increasingly not productive nor interesting in the comments on HN and elsewhere.)

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#776

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #676

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still a little surprised that none of the other IT giants appears to have identified the Windows 7 EoL next year as a rare opportunity to grab a significant chunk of the desktop market and been building a credible competitor. Who, exactly, would be positioned to do that? Apple's not interested. RedHat/IBM I guess I could see, but their customer base is very different.

I wondered if Apple might make a play for that market. They have relatively little skin in the game in terms of online services. They have credibility in both mobile and laptop markets. They have at least some expertise in related areas like server, workstation and networking products. Perhaps more significantly, historically much of their success has come from making big plays that created new markets, and their cur…

> They have relatively little skin in the game in terms of online services.

App Store, iTunes Music Store, iTunes Book Store, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, etc.

Apple has been making as much of a PR stink about becoming an online services-focused company as Microsoft has. Arguably Apple has been doing even better in direct-to-consumer online services than Microsoft has in the same time period (their app store underperforming; their recent shuttering of an eBook store; etc). Apple just doesn't have (or seem to have interest in) the "big iron" side of Cloud services like AWS/GCP/Azure.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#777

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #342

a254613e wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about online microsoft account or something windows specific? Because that's not true, my password has been 40+ characters for a long time and I change it pretty often. For local login you can use a PIN, or set up windows hello, if you don't want to type in the long password every time.

> Are you talking about online microsoft account or something windows specific? I'm talking about the Microsoft online account, and I stand by my statement that I was limited to 14 characters until relatively recently (maybe not earlier-this-year recent, that part I'm not sure). Looking at my Microsoft password history, I've changed it five times since 2012 (when I started using a password manager), each one is 14 ch…

I've got more than a passing suspicion the 16 character limitation for Microsoft Accounts was a compatibility need with Windows XP, because the restriction was fixed almost exactly as soon as Windows XP finally hit EOL.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#778

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #159

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #100

...and from what I can tell, their online account security is craptastic. Here’s a true story that happened to my family. My son is the only person in the house who uses Windows. For his game machine. He set up a Microsoft online account. It got hacked - someone set up a fake family and managed to get my son’s account listed under it as a child. As a consequence, he couldn’t install any new software. I’m not sure wha…

It is a griefers hack. Your son gets denied and basically has to do work, or make a new account.

It's also a "griefer's first social engineering" hack, so it has at least some small "fun" difficulty connected to it. To add a child account when you aren't directly creating the child account on the same device, Microsoft requires an Invite flow that sends an email to the child account asking them to accept "joining the family". So either the griefer also had the password to the account to login to the account on their machine (or otherwise access emails to it) or they somehow social engineered the victim to accepting an invitation to "join them" for something. The griefer can blame the victim for being gullible and claim that it wasn't the griefer's fault the victim fell for it.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

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Post by filleduchaos » Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #667

filleduchaos wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever used a Mac?

Mac App Store definitely requires Apple ID.

I've used the App Store like one whole time in my entire life and that was to upgrade Xcode once.

Elsewhere you mention a VPN client requiring you to download it from the App Store - well take it up with the app developer then because I've used tons of VPN clients on Mac (currently using ExpressVPN in fact) and all were straight out of DMGs.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#780

Post by chipotle_coyote » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #706

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they really are marketing that monitor only to those customers. People who want the computer but don't expect to be editing feature films with it can get a 5K LG monitor for $1300. (Of course, those people -- even the ones editing feature films, when push comes to shove -- could also probably get an iMac Pro, or even just a "normal" iMac with bumped-up specs.)

Naw, not unless you’re firing up an eGPU...not for 4K, anyway.

Everything I'd read suggests that Avid Media Composer gets along just fine with 4K video on a (non-Pro) iMac, if you bump up to a Core i9, Radeon 580, and 32G of RAM or so. The eGPU or the iMac Pro would be nicer, but the base iMac is still powerful enough it's not going to make you hate life. There were 4K movies being edited on less powerful machines just a few years ago, after all. :)