My Telegram account was compromised yesterday. The attacker logged out all my active sessions, enabled two-step verification (2FA), and linked a disposable recovery email.

I still have physical possession of the original SIM card and phone number. Naturally, I attempted to bypass the attacker's email by selecting the option to reset via SMS.

To my disbelief, Telegram blocked the request with an official prompt stating:

"Due to the high cost of SMS messages in your country, you must have a Telegram Premium subscription to reset your email with an SMS code."

The situation is absurd on multiple levels:

1. Paywalled Account Security: Telegram is literally holding basic recovery behind a paywall. A compromised user is told: "Pay for Premium, or you don't get your code."

2. Forced 3-Month Minimum: Since I am logged out, I cannot purchase a subscription myself. The app instructs me to have a friend gift it—where the absolute minimum gift duration is 3 months ($14.99).

3. The Deletion Trap: Trying to delete the account via my.telegram.org doesn't help because the confirmation code is sent INSIDE the Telegram app to the active session—meaning it goes directly to the hacker.

4. Non-existent Support: With a skeleton crew of ~30 engineers for nearly a billion users, tickets and official support channels are completely non-responsive.

Now, after repeated recovery attempts, the servers placed a 3-hour flood wait on my number.

Telegram markets itself as a privacy-focused, user-first platform, but when a real security incident happens, it operates like ransomware: locking out the legitimate owner and demanding payment just to deliver an SMS.

Been using it for years, thought something was messing up my PC when I turned it on today. Nope, Bing now makes your whole background an AD for 24 hours. Time to uninstall

I Just got an ads wile watching my video, i payed my subscription 2 weeks ago.

They send these weekly and make the title shorten to look like what you're tracking is back in stock. It's not.

This is such an asshole design. I know outlook can put ads on the top of your mail, but making it look like it's actual mail, and deceptively written to make you may have forgotten to pay for something to trick you into clicking to pay. I don't use McAfee, but the first thing I thought when I saw this was someone tried to pay using my information.

Whatever this bullshit it

..which Adobe offered to extend for 3 months for free. Now hit with this since I haven't used it since... no notification that you're entering a contract at all or warning. My fault for falling for this absolute shit housing.

Just a warning to others. Do NOT start any Adobe Trial they will try every which way to get your money.

It's not that serious, but I haven't had my PS5 connected to the internet recently, and I was installing this game while I was at work, when I got back and wanted to play, this is what I come back to. The only reason it isn't that serious, is because I CAN just connect back to the internet. Now imagine when all the PS5 related online features are shut down because they don't feel like keeping servers up.

I just wanted to try Opal. I started their 3-day Pro trial directly from their website on my Mac. Entered my card, subscribed, done. Super easy.

Then I tried to actually access what I had just paid for.

The website showed an “Open App & Redeem” button. I clicked it on my Mac. Nothing happened.

At this point, they had my card and a subscription that would automatically charge me in 3 days, but I had no properly connected account and no obvious place to manage or cancel it.

Thank FUCK I hadn’t closed the original browser tab.

Here’s what I eventually had to do:

1. Inspect/copy the redemption URL from my Mac
2. Send it to my iPhone
3. Download the Opal app
4. Create an account on my phone
5. Open the redemption URL manually on my phone
6. Finally get the subscription connected to my account
7. Contact their AI support to figure out how to cancel
8. Get sent to a Stripe customer portal
9. Discover there was NO cancellation option there
10. Ask the AI again
11. Get a completely different RevenueCat link
12. Finally cancel the subscription

It took me roughly 30 fucking minutes to cancel a trial that took seconds to start.

And I’m very comfortable with tech. What the fuck is a normal person supposed to do here?

If I had simply closed that original browser tab after subscribing, I genuinely don’t know how I would have found my way through this mess before the trial renewed.

Maybe this is just an unbelievably broken subscription flow. Maybe making cancellation this difficult happens to be great for conversions. Either way, this is exactly the kind of hostile UX that deserves to be called out.

Making the Subscribe button effortless while turning Cancel into a fucking treasure hunt across two devices, an AI chatbot, Stripe and RevenueCat is asshole design.

Update user agent and get the shit done.

Today we discovered Adobe Express Photos installed on a number of our corporate computers. Nobody in IT approved or deployed it, and the affected users did not intentionally install it.

It arrived automatically through the Acrobat update mechanism.

The app then took over the Windows screenshot shortcuts, including Print Screen and Win + Shift + S. It also changed the clipboard behaviour: screenshots pasted into Outlook Classic are now added as file attachments instead of being inserted into the email body.

Adobe’s own enterprise documentation confirms that Express Photos is a separate Windows application, but that it can be installed automatically through Acrobat updates.

Uninstalling it is not enough. According to Adobe, it may be installed "for your convenience" again during the next Acrobat update unless administrators deploy a registry policy specifically to block it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown

bDisableHarmonyInstallationFeature = 1

So Adobe used the automatic updater for a PDF application to install a different product, changed a native Windows workflow, caused problems in another application, and made administrators opt out through the registry to stop it coming back.

Official Adobe documentation:

https://helpx.adobe.com/business/enterprise/products-entitlements/manage-entitlements/adobe-express-photos-existing-users-admin-guide.html

This is real asshole behaviour.

I cancelled my Gemini AI Pro subscription several days before the end of my second month. The subscription had already been prepaid.

Google clearly shows the subscription as cancelled in my account, and I also received an email from Google confirming the cancellation.

A few days later, I started getting notifications from my bank that Google was attempting to charge my card $4.99.

The really frustrating part: Google keeps attempting the charge twice a day.

Fortunately, there isn't enough money on this particular card, so the charges are being declined.

I thought the obvious solution was simply to remove the card from my Google account.

Nope.

When I try to access the payment method management page, Google instead shows:

I can access and use everything else in my Google account normally. I have 2FA enabled and additional security verification configured.

So the situation is basically:

Subscription cancelled → Google keeps trying to charge me → I try to remove the card → Google won't let me → Google keeps trying to charge me.

I also contacted Google about the issue but haven't received a response.

The fact that the system can repeatedly attempt to charge a cancelled subscription while simultaneously preventing me from removing the payment method seems like a pretty good example of a billing system designed to make it difficult for the customer to stop recurring charges.

Screenshots available of the cancellation confirmation, bank notifications, and the “We couldn’t verify it’s you” page.

Service fee is added in checkout, that's why the total is different due to service fee.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/bmw-promised-your-dashboard-was-a-private-space-then-they-put-a-spider-man-ad-on-it/

It's obviously a fake name and nobody is mentioning this "name" in their academic papers - it's just a trap to get people to sign up for their "service". Who would keep paying after realizing they were lied to anyways?

The shopping cart right hand side bar and ALEXIA left hand side bar is taking about 40% of the screen space! :O

After shopping at amazon for decades, I've finally had enough. The side bar shopping cart is annoying, can't turn it off. It's been like that a while.

But now, they added an Alexis sidebar on the left, too! Anytime I search for a product, this sidebar of Alexis pops up to tell me all about this product and how it compares to others, and etc. At first it seemed kind of neat, informative. But once I realized it will keep popping up over and over no matter how many times I close, this is really going too far.

Having a side bar on the left and the right blocking my view of the products while I am shopping is a major annoyance.

I will now try and avoid doing business with amazon to the maximum of my ability. Enough is enough!

Oh, and i tried adding scripts to my ublock origin, and it still keeps forcing this garbage on me.

Of course when they stopped accepting returns on supplements, even unopened that was already too much. But now you've really pushed me off your site, with popup sidebars the entire time while shopping.

Is there a good reason for this nonsense? Do people really not know how to click the shopping cart, or do any research on products before shopping on amazon and need an annoying AI sidebar? You can't turn them off? Beyond absurd.

EDIT: After I closed the "Amazon integrated AI-powered shopping/"Alexa for Shopping" about 10 times, it finely stopped popping up.

Why It Stopped

• User Feedback Loop: The system is programmed to stop automatically opening the assistant sidebar if you manually close or dismiss it multiple times during your shopping sessions.

I switched over to Firefox a long time ago since they started warning about Mv2 depreciation. Now when I occasionally open it, it bugs me once a week to set it as the default browser, and you can't even X out of it. Looks like they've learned from Microsoft with Microsoft Edge, so they can continue tracking your browsing history and sell your data.

A billion-dollar retail giant (Tata's BigBasket) ran a massive "Buy 1 Get 1 Free" promotional banner on their app. I placed the order, they took my money upfront, delivered only 1 item, and instantly manipulated their backend to show the free promotional item as "Out of Stock."

The Exhaustion Tactic: When I asked for a refund for the undelivered item, they didn't connect me to human support. Instead, they deployed a 'Kapture CRM Bot' to trap me in an endless loop. Over the next 45 days, this bot sent me 90+ automated, irrelevant emails attaching random fake invoices of completely different products just to auto-close my support tickets.

Their entire business model relies on exhausting the customer so they give up on their refund.

But I didn’t give up. I am a 15-year-old 10th-grade student. Instead of studying for my board exams, I spent my time reading consumer law, drafted legal notices, and have officially dragged them to the District Consumer Court for a lawsuit.

Here is the live screen-recording of how their CRM bot deliberately traps customers in a 45-day spam loop: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HSJYmkrcEhjfppzMV5II8JcnvS2G3mW0/view?usp=drivesdk\]

Big corporations are using AI and bots not to help customers, but to build digital firewalls against accountability. Don't let them get away with it.