Agreed. I recently bought a new machine for home lab purposes that came with Windows 11. OK, I'll use it as one of many VMs atop ProxMox so I'll finish installing it, make a recovery USB and register it with my "Microsoft Account." Only when I tried to log into my "Microsoft account" which uses a Yahoo email as the identity name, I got an error saying the account was locked because of prior password failures. I haven't needed to log into Microsoft for 2-3 years so the failures weren't due to MY attempts. Fine. I go through the account recovery process which works but I find Microsoft's recovery flow forces ME to reset the password on the account. WAIT A MINUTE. I just provided you the alternate information to prove ownership, I supplied the PIN you sent to my contact phone, IT'S ME. Why am I having to change the password? Just unlock the account.

A day later, I tried to log back into the account with the new password and found I was locked out again because of password failures. So if there is some other user who THINKS they are joe.blow@yahoo.com and continually keeps trying to use that to access THEIR "Microsoft Account", they will keep locking out YOUR account AND keep making you change YOUR password each time to attempt to re-access the account.

So exactly WHY should I be surrendering local control of access to my machine to a multi-billion dollar company that hasn't been able to perfect something so basic as a account lock flow that doesn't impose such a horrible experience on the actual account owner?

There are worries that Russia has rigged reactors and containment pools at Eastern Europe's largest nuclear power generation facility with explosives to "salt the earth" essentially forever if they decide they cannot hold their position in Zaporizhzhia and people are worried about not being able to play Space Invaders or Missile Command in the original cheesy 1980 lo-res graphic format? Priorities, folks... There are many more important things to ponder.

I skipped class most of the time, barely passed my final in evidence and partied with friends the night before my bar exam but I think I did pretty good on the torts section and think I'd make an excellent attorney.

Is it surprising to learn the head of an agency spending $85.5 billion of our dollars on stuff we aren't allowed to know about is reporting his agency is doing a bang-up job? This is the problem with the National Security State we have created. Billions of dollars spent in the NSA, the CIA and DOD that can only be reviewed by maybe 20 members of the House and Senate who are completely captured by campaign financing from defense and IT firms totally dependent on these billions of secret dollars no one can second guess.

Yup. Most applications are session oriented. At the point you encounter an error, you know all of the following crucial pieces of information:

* the userid of the user (in case the error is role / security related)
* the date/time of the error down to the second
* the incoming request parameters that triggered the work that encountered your error
* the error itself
* which server executed the request (in case the code issue is server specific)

The only thing missing is some information about the intent of the user at the time they submitted the request. In a Java app, you could do something like this:

* have every command action in your application throw a special myappException
* define the myappException by extending the standard Exception and add the above fields
* catch that myAppException in your main event loop
* when caught, display a form that prompts the user for any additional explanation they might want to supply
* email the content of your myappException fields and their form-entered text to a dist list for your app support team

The resulting email will point your app support team and developers directly to the proper point in your application logs to figure out what else may have contributed to the error without being sent on a wild goose chase based upon bad timestamp information or incomplete text of the error / exception encountered.