Influencers on Instagram will tell you that taking huge amounts of turmeric is good for you. Your liver thinks otherwise. CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, but sadly no new post at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week? (Suggest a topic!)
A selection of 9 links for you. Not that tasty, no. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Pro basketball player and four youths arrested in connection to separate ransomware crimes • Ars Technica
Dan Goodin:
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Authorities in Europe have detained five people, including a former Russian professional basketball player, in connection with crime syndicates responsible for ransomware attacks.
Until recently, one of the suspects, Daniil Kasatkin, played for MBA Moscow, a basketball team that’s part of the VTB United League, which includes teams from Russia and other Eastern European countries. Kasatkin also briefly played for Penn State University during the 2018–2019 season. He has denied the charges.
The AFP and Le Monde on Wednesday reported that Kasatkin was arrested and detained on June 21 in France at the request of US authorities. The arrest occurred as the basketball player was at the de Gaulle airport while traveling with his fiancée, whom he had just proposed to. The 26-year-old has been under extradition arrest since June 23, Wednesday’s news report said.
US prosecutors accuse Kasatkin of having negotiated ransom payments with organizations that had been hacked by an unnamed ransomware syndicate responsible for 900 different breaches. A US arrest warrant said he is wanted for “conspiracy to commit computer fraud” and “computer fraud conspiracy.”
An attorney for Kasatkin said his client is innocent of all charges.
“He bought a second-hand computer,” the attorney told reporters. The attorney continued: “He did absolutely nothing. He’s stunned. He’s useless with computers and can’t even install an application. He didn’t touch anything on the computer. It was either hacked, or the hacker sold it to him to act under the cover of another person.”
US authorities are currently in the process of extraditing Kasatkin.
Authorities in the UK, meanwhile, arrested four individuals in connection with separate and unrelated ransomware operations. The UK’s National Crime Agency said the three men and one woman were arrested as part of an investigation into recent ransomware attacks targeting M&S, Co-op, and Harrods. M&S experienced major disruptions in its operations as a result. Both Co-op and Harrods have said damage to their networks was minimized after stopping the attack while it was still in progress.
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Summertime, and the hacking is easy. The hacking was carried out in April and May, which often coincides with school or university holidays for teens. Those arrested in the UK were aged 20 (the female), 19, 19 and 17. Want to feel old? LulzSec was doing this back in June 2011. Their arrests came in August. It’s almost as if it’s a pattern.
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Woman says NBC News report made her recognize liver damage from turmeric pills • NBC News
Marina Kopf and Emilie Ikeda:
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Katie Mohan started taking daily turmeric pills in March after seeing a doctor on Instagram tout its benefits for inflammation and joint pain relief.
A few weeks later, the 57-year-old started having stomach pain, nausea and fatigue. “I just did not feel well generally,” she said. “I also noticed that despite drinking a lot of water every day, that my urine was darker.”
Mohan didn’t connect her symptoms to the herbal pills. Not until she saw an NBC News report in May on the growing rates of liver damage from herbal supplements. “A light bulb went off in my head and I said, Oh, my gosh! I wonder if this is what’s wrong with me.”
She recognized her symptoms in the patient interviewed, Robert Grafton, who was also taking the same high dose of turmeric pills, 2,250 mg.
There are no clear guidelines in the United States about how much turmeric is safe to consume and turmeric pills are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to an evaluation by the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is 0-3 mg per kilogram of body weight.
For a woman weighing 150 pounds, that would be about 200 mg of turmeric daily.
Mohan went to urgent care within a week of the NBC News report, where her blood work showed liver enzyme levels about 60 times the normal limit. She was admitted to a local New Jersey hospital and then transferred to NYU Langone in New York City.
“It was very serious,” said Dr. Nikolaos Pyrsopoulos, a hepatologist at NYU. “Katie actually was one step before full liver damage, liver failure, requiring liver transplant.”
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Do we miss those awful gatekeepers who might have checked first whether taking huge amounts of turmeric is bad for you before publicising it?
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How long does a film take to recoup? • Decoding the World
Stephen Follows:
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I studied 328 feature films which received funding awards from the BFI (or its predecessor the UK Film Council). By piecing together the annual accounts we are able to get a picture of when money flowed back to the BFI.
Over this fifteen-year period, just over a third of all the money came in during the first year of recoupment, with 89% being received within the first four years.
…Each film will have a slightly different recoupment pattern. For example
• Slow burns – An independent film can take time to get noticed and to gain worldwide income. For example, The King’s Speech was unusual in that it took a couple of years to hit its peak as it was released internationally and eventually went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
• Upfront deals – A distribution deal could include a Minimum Guarantee (MG) which is deducted from future income. This can result in no income for a number of years while that MG is repaid. Most films never repay their MG but those that do will see a small trickle of income after that period. For example, 28 Days Later saw a large income in years one and two, then nothing for a further five years, after which time money started coming in again.
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That last – 28 Days Later – has surely had a revival in income because the franchise (28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, 28 Years Later) recently got its last instalment, unless they fill in with 28 Months Later, or stretch out to 28 Decades or Centuries Later. But films are notorious for having incredibly opaque financial structures where nobody, but a few people, knows whether they’ve made money.
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How the owner of Hidden Valley Ranch learned to love AI • WSJ
Christopher Mims:
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Hidden Valley Ranch needed a new formula. No, the recipe for America’s favorite condiment wasn’t changing. After all, last year it beat ketchup in sales.
But a proposed ad created by AI tools made a plate of chicken wings look…unappetizing. The wings were pale and undersauced, like they came from an amateur’s kitchen.
Clorox, the company that owns the Hidden Valley Ranch brand, has been using generative artificial intelligence to churn out ads for foods Americans might want to pair with the tangy dressing, from burritos to gyozas. The tech allowed the company to generate visuals quickly and on the cheap, and then microtarget their campaigns, testing a wide variety of ads.
When the chicken-wing image fell short, the team threw even more AI at it. By refining their prompt, they were able to create a saucier, crispier, more enticing aesthetic.
Clorox’s AI experimentation is rooted in a five-year, $580m digital transformation, which started in 2021. It gave every team a mandate—and a budget—to change how they work. ChatGPT was released a year into the effort, and many at the company started to experiment with new generative AI tools.
Its biggest lesson so far: Company leaders can’t dictate how teams should use the tools. Instead, they have to see what people are doing in their own departments, then help the best practices spread through the ranks.
“We believe it’s got to be the people doing the work” who decide what AI approaches make sense and boost productivity, says Linda Rendle, chief executive of Clorox.
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Researchers jailbreak AI by flooding it with bullshit jargon • 404 Media
Matthew Gault:
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You can trick AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini into teaching you how to make a bomb or hack an ATM if you make the question complicated, full of academic jargon, and cite sources that do not exist.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper authored by a team of researchers from Intel, Boise State University, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The research details this new method of jailbreaking LLMs, called “Information Overload” by the researchers, and an automated system for attack they call “InfoFlood.” The paper, titled “InfoFlood: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Information Overload” was published as a preprint.
Popular LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or LLaMA have guardrails that stop them from answering some questions. ChatGPT will not, for example, tell you how to build a bomb or talk someone into suicide if you ask it in a straightforward manner. But people can “jailbreak” LLMs by asking questions the right way and circumvent those protections.
This new jailbreak “transforms malicious queries into complex, information-overloaded queries capable of bypassing built-in safety mechanisms,” the paper explained. “Specifically, InfoFlood: (1) uses linguistic transformations to rephrase malicious queries, (2) identifies the root cause of failure when an attempt is unsuccessful, and (3) refines the prompt’s linguistic structure to address the failure while preserving its malicious intent.”
The researchers told 404 Media that they suspected large language models “treat surface form as a cue for toxicity rather than truly understanding the user’s intent.”
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Rather as the invention of the ship led to the shipwreck, and (big jump forward) the invention of the SQL database led to the invention of SQL injection, so the LLM leads inevitably to prompt injection. And they all, in their own way, are impossible to eradicate; we can only reduce their number.
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EssilorLuxottica shares leap on reports of $3.5bn Meta stake • Investing via Yahoo News
Vahid Karaahmetovic:
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Meta Platforms Inc has purchased a stake in EssilorLuxottica valued at approximately $3.5bn, according to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, reinforcing its strategic push into AI-powered eyewear.
Shares in the Italian-French eyewear maker jumped 5% on the report.
The acquisition of just under 3% in EssilorLuxottica aligns with Meta’s ambition to grow outside traditional platforms and advance in hardware innovation.
The move builds on Meta’s ongoing partnership with EssilorLuxottica, creator of Ray-Ban and Oakley, in co-developing smart glasses. Meta currently markets Ray-Ban smart glasses, incorporating features like embedded cameras and AI assistants, and more recently introduced a new line of Oakley-branded products enhanced with similar technology.
Citing sources, Bloomberg reported that Meta may expand its stake to roughly 5% in the future, though no final decision has been made. The investment cements Meta’s position as a strategic partner, while keeping its ownership as a minority investor.
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Smart glasses are going to be a thing in, what, five years? Ten years? Big investments like this tend to pull the date closer. My suspicion is that the phone will become like a mouse – it’ll control what we see in the smart glasses, and we can do things on the touchscreen to change that, but we’ll look in the glasses rather than at the phone. (Rather like with in-ear headphones now.)
If you doubt me, just look at how many people would gladly replace their phones with smart glasses as they walk along streets now.
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What happens after A.I. destroys college writing? • The New Yorker
Hua Hsu:
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Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.” Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”
…He opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.
…But for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.
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The answer seems to be twofold: colleges (and universities) will revert to handwritten work, or they’ll try to expand what their courses involve so that AI becomes an assistant, rather than a crutch. Which do we think will win?
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Far-right conspiracy theories spread online in aftermath of the Texas floods • The Guardian
Ben Makuch:
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Disasters and tragedies have long been the source of American conspiracy theories, old and new. So when devastating flash floods hit Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and as the death toll continues to rise, far-right conspiracists online saw their opportunity to come out in full force, blurring the lines of what’s true and untrue.
Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.
“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”
The same chain of posts on the social media platform X singled out a California-based “precipitation enhancement” company as a potential culprit.
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One observes an entire country losing its mind, piece by piece. Strange how the culprit is never the oil companies, though. You’d think just by a process of elimination they’d get around to them eventually.
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These ultra-thin “perovskite” solar panels are so light you can wear them • CNN
Rebecca Cairns and Hazel Pfeifer:
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As summer temperatures in Osaka, Japan, soar closer to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, staff at Expo 2025 are beating the heat with utility vests that are powered by the sun.
Developed by Toyota Group company Toyoda Gosei, in collaboration with solar cell startup Enecoat Technologies and textile manufacturer Seiren, the utility vests are fitted with ultra-thin, flexible solar panels that weigh less than four grams each — lighter than a single sheet of paper — and power neck fans to keep the wearer cool.
These solar “films” aren’t like the silicon panels installed on roofs or solar farms, which account for 98% of the solar energy market today. Instead, they’re made of perovskites, a family of crystals that share the same characteristic structure.
Perovskite solar cells are lighter, cheaper to produce, and can be tuned to absorb a broader range of light, including visible and near-infrared. They can even be charged “under shade, in rainy and cloudy weather,” says Shinichiro Fuki, director of the Toyoda Gosei team behind the vest.
In the lab, Enecoat’s solar film has achieved 21.2% efficiency, meaning around a fifth of the solar energy is converted to electricity. Now, it is being tested in real-world conditions at the Expo.
The team is gathering data daily on how it responds to different climate conditions, such as solar radiation and temperature, as well as the performance of the mobile battery that it connects to, which is expected to fully charge in five to 10 hours.
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Perovskite! First mentioned here back in 2020 from a British company, but Enecoat is a Japanese startup.
Promising technology – they’re about 33% more efficient than standard solar cells.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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