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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

#81

Post by nvrspyx »

userbinator wrote: post #56
nvrspyx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've changed things in Group Policy (e.g., disable Bing/web search in Windows search) because there's no user-facing setting to disable some things and mine says the same. If you've done similar or used any debloat/privacy tools/scripts, that's probably the cause. Additionally, go to Accounts in Settings and double-check that you're not logged into any "work or school" accounts. The one thing I can't stand is that if…

A single button that says "Yes" with no question mark anywhere in the dialog is definitely a dark pattern.

I didn't even notice that the dialog title, "Use this account everywhere on this device", isn't really presented as a question. Thanks for pointing that out.

Windows is full of dark patterns, so I don't really know why I had even a modicum of doubt.

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

#82

Post by blep_ »

philliphaydon wrote: post #75
pmontra wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they think that they must use Windows no matter how bad it is.

Windows is no more bad than macOS or any distro of linux.

> At least my [...] Windows licenses are still working—but could the school revoke that access too?

This, at least, is a thing I have never even had to consider as a remote possibility on Linux.

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

#83

Post by tacker2000 »

amatecha wrote: post #55
capybara_2020 wrote: post #24

This really goes to show what depending on online authentication from a large corp can do. Even worse, Microsoft is now trying to force online accounts onto Windows machines. Google already does it with Android. Which means for some reason if you lose access to your email, you are locked out of not only your online accounts but your local devices also. We really need to separate authentication from services and devic…

Yeah, that shit is why I took a brand-new NVIDIA Shield back to the store immediately after getting it home - it literally cannot be used without signing into a Google account. I bought it thinking, "hey nice, I can use this 4K Android home theatre device without Google being involved, since it's from NVIDIA and thus hopefully free of all that crap". I even did my homework on this: no material included with the produ…

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.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

xxs wrote: post #23
greggsy wrote: post #12

Despite 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…

>malice that other comments seem to be directing at Microsoft Giving such permissions to a 3rd party could be just a gross incompetence instead of malice. Yet, it should never happen.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by zamnos »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #68
zamnos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A father with a daughter that goes to a school, and the father has a Microsoft account, is nowhere near an "edge of functionality". Sounds more like Microsoft has a too-complex login system on their hands, one that needs a ton of backend rework to happen in order to simplify the system for the user (and the developer)'s sanity. Also, a software engineering product run by a large organization is going to have tons mor…

> is nowhere near an "edge of functionality" No, but something unusual went wrong and getting it fixed will be harder at MS than a smaller company. There probably isn't a single person who understands why without a fair amount of research. Without the publicity, MS would be inclined not to spend the effort to fix. > Also, a software engineering product run by a large organization is going to have tons more functional…

Ah. It's because it's nowhere near the edge of functionality, I don't think something particularly unusual actually went wrong here. Mr Jeff just hit a bug. But because Microsoft is such a huge company, and fathers with daughters who go to a school is such a large segment of users (and because Microsoft is not as obtuse as Apple, where Apple pretends their software has no bugs), I bet there's already a product manager spinning up a customer service bulletin going out to reps to school IT departments and a team of developers to add the fix to a roadmap and fix the problem globally.

Or maybe the bug's just going to languish and our friend Jeff here is going to be forced to create a new Microsoft account.

--

As far as AWS' products being independent products. I have the opposite view, as their products would be rather useless if they didn't interoperate with each other. How useless S3 would be if it couldn't talk to anything else!

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

#86

Post by Stranger43 »

dustedcodes wrote: post #52
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"...

How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.

Because nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

Enterprise IT is conservative and full of strange politics that make it really dangerous for an admin team or it department to stick their head out and do something independent other then follow the "mythical industry best practice" and MS is extremely good at manipulating what gets considered "industry best practice" to their advantage and then give just enough discount on the more visible parts of the costs to look cheaper.

And it's a open secret that individual employee productivity don't matter all that much in the kind of back end work where a PC was ever a feasible tool, as what really counts for profitability is the non-pc using frontline staff's productivity, who is far more likely to be issued either no computers or mobile phones or tablet then wintel laptops.

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

#87

Post by ccouzens »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
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"...

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.

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

#88

Post by nix23 »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #47
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"...

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.

The real solution is not to use systems who allows that.

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

#89

Post by LeonB »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #51
LeonB wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Ok - that sounds like the exact thing. It was so very odd when it happened. I’m sure I tweeted about it at the time, or put it on mastodon if it was more recent.

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

#90

Post by emeril »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #19
LeonB wrote: post #5

The way Microsoft accounts work is almost completely opaque to users. I’ve been in similar scenarios — the switch directory or switch organisation technique usually worked for me - but wasn’t enough for this person. They never really give you enough information to tell what’s going on… maybe it’s a security risk to have consumers who are anything other than bewildered Kafkerian characters struggling against a faceles…

Try having a kid and segregating funds for them while paying for their Xbox Game Pass and a Minecraft Realm with your account. I have 25 years of Windows software development experience and I was almost reduced to tears just trying to understand what I'm even trying to accomplish. Realms is still in some kind of half subscribed, half not subscribed state and it still asks for my account's PIN for purchases but actual…

my general approach to this garbage is to just keep making new accounts/email addresses (on my domain) for each purpose

this keeps everything from being comingled at the expense of maintaining all of those credentials

also, as a bonus, if you organize this by subdomain you can sort your email by it automatically since most emails from this stuff don't really need to hit your inbox

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