Gemini ads are appearing as notifications on Google Pixel phones. While regular notifications have a "Turn off" button for easily disabling those that are unwanted, these must be turned off in your phones system settings (disabling notifications for the Google app).
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:
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.
This is the most fucked up targeted ad I've ever been served. About 4 hours ago I put down a dog I've loved fiercely for 16 years. I wanted to ease his suffering while buying time for my children to get home and say good-bye, so I was researching how to help him when he was struggling to breathe. This is the most unimaginably cruel way to leverage targeted advertising against my search history. How dare you imply for a moment that if I had only bought this product my dog would still be here?? This attempt to profit through cruelty and shame is lower than the depths of hell your marketing executives belong in.
Been digging into how usage limits work on some AI platforms and found something that feels pretty sketchy:
Default monthly spend limit used to be $0, hit your usage cap and you just wait for the reset (4hrs/weekly).
They added a "monthly spend limit" feature so you could opt in to pay for extra usage instead of waiting.
Then they rolled me into a promo: 2x usage + $100 "free" credit, both prominently shown right on the usage tracking screen.
To make that credit spendable, they also silently bumped my monthly spend limit from $0 to $2,000 (!!!). That part wasn't shown anywhere near as prominently, if a reasonable person glancing at the screen wouldn't catch it, it shouldn't be buried in fine print.
I only noticed after burning through $17 of the "free" $100, when I went looking for why it said I was drawing on "API spend."
I've since seen a few posts on FB/Reddit from people with surprise charges in the $40 to $50 range, adding up to $2k+, because they assumed they were still capped at $0 like before.
Anyone else run into this? Curious if silently bumping spend limits during a promo is common practice, or if this is an especially bad case.
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:
This is real asshole behaviour.
I literally run my own email server, and can say as an absolute fact no one is in my email address. Unsure why they feel the need to dictate this.
In the getsafe insurance app I won airpods but to claim them I have to get dental insurance - so I didn't win anything and it's just: free airpods if you buy this insurance?!
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.
It also stays on screen even if you skip the ad and as you saw after I clicked dismiss it gave me ANOTHER pop-up that partially covered the skip button which is also annoying. Cherry on top is the AI generated ad for a generative AI based app
It’s too damn close for my thumbs. 50% of the time I either end up clicking on the link or joining the sub.
Yes, I misclicked it a few times since the update. It makes zero design sense in terms of ease of chatting for a right handed person. Your thumbs will naturally extend from the right side and they placed it there to be accidentally clicked to see their offer.
