The price of Apple products seems likely to shoot up if Trump’s tariffs come into effect. CC-licensed photo by Brian Snelson on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Uninflated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Trump’s 60% tariffs could push China to hobble tech industry growth • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of “when” not “if” companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.

During Trump’s last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.

As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60% tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.

Currently, there are more than $300bn in tariffs on Chinese imports, but notably, there are none yet on popular tech like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and game consoles. Back when Trump last held office, the tech industry successfully lobbied to get those exemptions, warning that the US economy would hugely suffer if tariffs were imposed on consumer tech. Prices on game consoles alone could spike by as much as 25% as tech companies coped with increasing costs from tariffs, the industry warned, since fully decoupling from China was then, and is still now, considered impossible.

Trump’s proposed 60% tariff would cost tech companies four times more than that previous round of tariffs that the industry dodged when Trump last held office. A recent Consumer Technology Association (CTA) study found that prices could jump even higher than previously feared if consumer tech is as heavily taxed as Trump intends. Laptop prices could nearly double, game console prices could rise by 40%, and smartphone prices by 26%.

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Bet Apple is absolutely delighted at this prospect.
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Tracking Harris and Trump’s ad spending on Facebook and Instagram • Bellingcat

Pooja Chaudhuri and Melissa Zhu:

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By summing up the average spending for all ads by each presidential candidate’s campaigns, we found that Harris’ campaign has spent about US$113m  – more than a small country’s GDP – advertising on Facebook and Instagram between July 21 and Oct. 30, while Trump’s campaign spent about US$17m in total.

Both figures likely represent just the tip of the iceberg for the candidates’ total ad spending across television and digital advertising including on other online platforms such as Google. 

Almost all (99.8%) of the ads sponsored by Harris’ campaign ran on both Facebook and Instagram, whereas almost 26% of those supporting Trump were only shown on Facebook, and 7.5% targeted only Instagram. 

This is only a fraction of both campaigns’ and their supporters’ spending on ads. An NPR analysis published on November 1, found that over $10bn has been spent in the 2024 election cycle, beginning January 2023, on races from president, senate to county commissioner. This includes ads on TV, radio, satellite, cable and other digital ads.

To estimate how much each campaign spent advertising on Meta’s platforms, we multiplied the average spending for each ad with the the percentage of ad delivery for each region (the data previously extracted from the “delivery_by_region” column), assuming that the amount spent in each region was proportional to where audiences eventually saw the ad.

Based on our calculations, the Harris campaign directed more advertising dollars in swing states with the highest spending in Pennsylvania – reported as the toughest swing state by election strategists – than any other state.

Pennsylvania played a crucial role in the 2020 election with Biden winning by a narrow margin. The state backed Trump in the 2016 election. 

The seven swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – are regarded as holding the key to the White House in the 2024 election. The Trump campaign has also focused on the swing states, but Democrats have outspent Republicans in each of those states.

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My conclusion, based on that: 2016 is long gone. This was not the social media election.
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Foundation’s edge • Unbalancing Mechanism

Adam Bell:

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[In the 1980s and 1990s] New nuclear power stations were considerably more expensive than building a new fleet of combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power stations. These were able to achieve thermal efficiencies of 55-60% and make best use of cheap North Sea gas. We stopped building nuclear power stations because we had a cheaper alternative.

And this was not simply a matter of Government making the wrong investment decisions. At privatisation the new generation companies refused to take on the UK’s existing nuclear fleet, judging both its running costs and potential liabilities as being not worth the candle. The Government kept them in public hands and forced utilities to buy power from them through the Non-Fossil Fuels Obligation. If we had maintained the nuclear build-out under public control, we would have had higher electricity costs throughout the 90s and 00s. And, consequently, lower growth.

The second explanation the authors [of the essay Foundations] put forward is that the increased use of wind and solar in our power system is driving costs up. This is not because of how much it costs to build out these technologies, but rather the costs of integrating them into our electricity system – more transmission lines to where the wind actually is, increased costs of balancing to accommodate intermittency, and the need to pay for backup for periods of low wind and low sun.

The reason why we cancelled our nuclear build-out and the reason why industrial power prices are now high is the same: the price of gas. The CCGT fleet we built in the 90s is now driving prices higher. The bounty of the North Sea ran out in the 2000s and we now import the majority of our needs. As a result, our marginal gas supply is liquified natural gas traded on global markets over which we have little control. Even the minor expansion of North Sea extraction that new exploration would unlock would do very little to move the dial here.

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And there are tons of pricing contracts for renewables which pay at least as much as the price of gas on the network. It’s strange how we get locked into our past actions; for all that we tell ourselves we can forecast the future, we get stuck with one foot in the solid concrete of what we did.
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Secrets of a ransomware negotiator • The Economist

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Last autumn, somewhere in Europe, a security operations centre noticed something. This is the primary job of a security operations centre – to notice things. Its role is simple, protecting organisations by tracking the people using their computer networks. Its name is often abbreviated to a simple acronym, SOC (pronounced “sock”.) The people who work at a SOC are the cyber-security equivalent of night guards at the mall, sitting at a bank of television screens: watching, waiting, trying not to doze off.

In this case, what they noticed was someone trying to log in to a staff member’s account at one of the companies the SOC monitors, using a series of incorrect passwords. About a thousand times in one day. This seemed suspicious. Someone at the SOC sent someone at the company an email, letting them know about the failed logins.

The cyber-security industry exists to keep information secret and reputations intact. I am able to tell you this story only if I keep the company in question anonymous, though you might have heard of it. Picture a company that provides boring administrative services to thousands of organisations across the planet. The kind of company that your own employer subcontracts. A company everyone relies on but no one really bothers to think about.

Both the SOC and the company were certified as meeting “the world’s best-known standard for information security”. But when the SOC alerted the company’s staff to the failed logins, they did nothing. The SOC didn’t press the issue. No one noticed that the user was eventually able to log in. Or that the account belonged to an employee who no longer worked there. No one noticed that it was an administrator-level account, which provided access to the company’s entire network. No one noticed anything amiss – for about a month.

Then, one day, the company’s servers began malfunctioning. A series of alarming emails arrived. “We managed to obtain a lot of secret documents, internal documents classified as strictly confidential, personal data of current employees!” read one. There was a link to a private chat room, and a deadline for using it. The hackers wanted to talk.

Some hours later, a phone rang on the other side of the world. Nick Shah was asleep at his beach house on the tropical island of Mauritius, which is in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When he picked up, it was a colleague with bad news.

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Shah is the ransomware negotiator (it’s a fast-growing trade) and this is an entertaining story.
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India’s lithium mining plans in Kashmir have stalled • Rest of World

Yashraj Sharma:

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Sunil Thakur, a 24-year-old engineering graduate, once planned to build a career as a civil engineer. But jobs were scarce, and so Thakur spent his days frying samosas for his family’s snack shop in Salal — a picturesque mountain village of about 10,000 people in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Then, in February 2023, Thakur’s dreams of prosperity were suddenly revived.

India’s mining ministry informed the villagers that they were sitting on a fortune: 5.9 million metric tons of lithium, a silver-white metal that is a core component of the batteries necessary for India’s transition to clean energy.

The discovery — a first in India — would make the country the holder of the fifth-largest lithium reserve in the world, mining officials announced. Indian media outlets jubilantly reported that companies including Mitsubishi, Tesla, and Ola Electric were eyeing the reserve.

Thakur and his family started daydreaming about selling their land in exchange for “a duplex home in a big Indian city, and loads of cash,” he said. He imagined investing in the family business, first established by his grandfather nearly four decades ago.

Two years later, nothing has happened. The government tried to auction the lithium block twice in March, and failed both times, due to a lack of bidders. The extraction plans have been halted indefinitely.

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“Did we say 5.9 million? We meant 0.02 million, and in clay deposits that make it hard to extract. Anyone?”
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Botched little animals • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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In the course of writing Superbloom over the last few years, I found myself losing patience with the prevailing critique of social media and the internet, the one that portrays the technology as something imposed on us by an imperious external force (progress or capitalism or Big Tech or what-have-you) and that in turn depicts us as the hapless, helpless victims of that force’s exploitative and manipulative powers. The problem with this line of inquiry is not that it’s invalid — it’s valid, and it’s necessary — but that it’s incomplete. It skirts around our own complicity. It too easily separates our botched little animals from our botched little selves.

One of the central arguments of the book is that the commercial internet, and social media in particular, is a machine fine-tuned to sense our desires and fulfill them. If “the algorithm” manipulates us, it does so by giving us what we want. The machine’s manipulative power is secondary to, and dependent on, the pleasure it provides.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre stressed the importance of distinguishing “between what we desire and the choiceworthy” and “between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy.” Making such distinctions has always been difficult. Digital media, with its hyperactive solicitude and its automation of the act of choosing, makes them more difficult than ever — and more important than ever. Because technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.

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Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

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the economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world.

From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year.

The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.

Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.

Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years.

That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.

But it’s not just about inflation. An update of economist Arthur Okun’s “misery index” — the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates — for this era might swap out joblessness and replace it with immigration. On this basis, the past couple of years in the US, UK and dozens of other countries have been characterised by more economic and societal upheaval than they have seen in generations.

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Police freak out at iPhones mysteriously rebooting themselves, locking cops out • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Law enforcement officers are warning other officials and forensic experts that iPhones which have been stored securely for forensic examination are somehow rebooting themselves, returning the devices to a state that makes them much harder to unlock, according to a law enforcement document obtained by 404 Media.

The exact reason for the reboots is unclear, but the document authors, who appear to be law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan, hypothesize that Apple may have introduced a new security feature in iOS 18 that tells nearby iPhones to reboot if they have been disconnected from a cellular network for some time. After being rebooted, iPhones are generally more secure against tools that aim to crack the password of and take data from the phone.

“The purpose of this notice is to spread awareness of a situation involving iPhones, which is causing iPhone devices to reboot in a short amount of time (observations are possibly within 24 hours) when removed from a cellular network,” the document reads. 

Apple did not provide a response on whether it introduced such an update in time for publication. Regardless, the reported iPhone reboots highlight the constant cat and mouse game between law enforcement officers and forensic experts on one side, and phone manufacturers Apple and Google on the other.

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It would make sense as a safety feature for “Find my iPhone”, for example: the phone will turn on and let the world know where it is.
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Man spent $2m to find new largest prime number • Popular Science

Andrew Paul:

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Formed in 1999, GIMPS [Greater Internet Mersenne Prime Search] relies on an international network of volunteers who download specialized software that harnesses their computers’ unused programming capabilities to search for exceptionally large Mersenne prime numbers. Named after Marin Mersenne, the 17th-century French friar who first studied them, Mersenne primes are defined as 2n-1, where “n” is any integer. While these begin relatively simply with the number 3 (22-1), they quickly climb to giant numbers that surpass any single human mind’s mathematical skills. They become so difficult to calculate, in fact, that the newest example, officially designated M136279841, is just the 52nd known Mersenne prime number.

Announced on Tuesday, GIMPS explained that M136279841 was first suspected on October 11 by a 36-year-old former NVIDIA employee named Luke Durant using what’s known as Fermat probable prime test. After Durant notified GIMPS of his possible breakthrough, several other computers around the world conducted multiple Lucas-Lehmer primality tests to ensure M136279841’s prime-ness, leading to its official confirmation 10 days later.

Durant’s achievement also marks a major moment in the hunt for Mersenne prime numbers—it’s the first of its kind to be found through the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of traditional central processing units (CPUs). GPUs have come to prominence in recent years in conjunction with the rise of machine learning, large language models, and artificial intelligence, all of which often rely on massive GPU networks to function. For 28 years, GIMPS volunteers relied on CPU power to use the organization’s original software. In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.

A single GPU isn’t likely to net a 41,024,320-digit number, however. Durant, for example, found M136279841 through a supercomputer cloud network he built using server GPUs throughout 24 datacenter regions in 17 countries. Such a large system isn’t cheap, either—The Washington Post reports the project cost Durant around $2m since he started looking for the 52nd Mersenne number in October 2023.

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The discoverers of the Mersenne primes are a varied bunch. Previously, in 2018: Fedex employee discovers largest prime number.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified