Anything pertaining to the Guitar Hero/Rock Band duopoly garners exhaustive attention nowadays. So it’s no surprise that Neversoft’s major follow-up to Guitar Hero III is bigger in most every way in a bid to unseat Rock Band with its immersive group play.

IGN: Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

But under the face-melting surface, World Tour’s greater influence may ultimately be in the steady march towards unifying simulation (pretend you’re a rock star!) and emulation (make actual music!). In the past we’ve come to this junction from the other direction, using game platforms as engines for music production: MTV Music Generator series on the Playstation 2 (used by artists like Boomkat to sketch out songs), Nanaloop on the Game Boy (part of the 8-bit music movement), and upcoming touch-studio offerings for the iPhone like MooCowMusic’s Band and Intua’s BeatMaker. Meanwhile, rhythm games by the likes of Harmonix (Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero) and Konami’s Bemani division (Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks) have gradually introduced ever more elaborate interactions between players and underlying musical performances. In FreQuency, for example, a secondary mode allowed players to ‘remix’ songs in freeform fashion after unlocking them through normal play.

Based on this early preview, World Tour is even more ambitious with its Music Creator mode. While normal gameplay will center around the established note-matching mechanism for various instruments, the proposed editor supports multi-track note creation for each of the supported instruments (minus vocals, evidently for legal reasons—cross apply the perversities that abound in most online smack talk and this makes regrettable sense). Premade loops, tempo control, and beat quantizing are provided within a wizard interface to simplify the learning curve. For laying down tracks, the guitar controller provides extensive options: you can program drum machines through the new touch-sensitive fret strip on the guitar controller, trigger samples by fret buttons, change pitch with the strum bar and sample speed through the Star Power tilt control. Need more crunch? Licensed Pod modeling technology from Line 6 lets you can choose your amplifier. Want to generate notes algorithmically? Use the built-in arpeggiator. Once you’ve finished laying down tracks, a separate mix mode is available for looping and editing. Finally, you publish your creation (complete with custom cover art) to an online community store where others can download and play it within the game. User ratings will drive online charts. Voilá, you’re a published musician.

One of the most common comment-thread trolls since the release of Guitar Hero has been purist backlash: "why not play a real guitar?" Up to now, the typical answer is along the lines of, "because this [playing a simplified game]  is more fun than learning the real thing." And certainly, to remain successful, World Tour will need to retain that sense of rock star power at mere mortal effort levels. But the potential for the Creator mode, and whatever follows it, to create a new level of musical expression suggests an exciting future of entertainment all its own.

I have never watched The Sopranos, and my knowledge of plot points is mostly limited to examples given in a lecture from The Sopranos and Philosophy (specifically about Tony Soprano as an ethical manager). Yet I still found this exhaustingly detailed argument about the final moments of the series finale to be compelling reading. The unattributed author calls on intertextual references, cinematographic clues, symbology, authorial intent, film precursors, and philosophical precepts to make the case "why Tony died in Holsten’s in the final scene of The Sopranos." Even without any of the necessary background as a viewer, I can certainly appreciate the obsessive passion to craft a canonical resolution to a long-running and well-regarded series, as well as some of the formal elements that are particular to fan discussions (e.g. unnamed characters discussed by acronym—see the comments for a suitably pedantic mini-debate over the correct abbreviation for "Man in Member‘s Only Jacket").

The Sopranos: Definitive Explanation of “The END”

Albums added in May: 13,572

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John Timmer reports on studies from the journal Science which suggest that ineurotransmitter levels influence perceived fairness:

Exploring the neurochemistry of fairness

First, consider the notion of innate fairness. People who participated in a experimental transaction called the Ultimatum Game (a simple 2-party example of game theory) tended to reject offers they perceive as ‘unfair’ even though doing so results in them receiving less. This reinforces a recurring theme in current economic theory that participants often act fundamentally irrationally (e.g. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and other efforts in behavioral economics). One hypothesis drawn from the Ultimatum Game is an underlying evolutionary selection of a shared ‘golden rule,’ given the comparative advantage of group cohesion this might reinforce.

Second, the implications of the neurochemistry itself are more sobering. Even basic negotiation is often based on latent manipulation through psychological leverage; more advanced techniques sometimes exploit physiological factors such as room temperature or sleep deprivation to affect pliability. The casino industry has invested heavily in psychological profiling both in developing comp systems and interior design to lower inhibitions and increase the desire to stay on the gaming floor (high ceilings, rounded walls, indirect lighting, running water)—some examples are given in a short featurette on the DVD for Ocean’s Thirteen. Pushed a little further, you can see some of the same techniques deployed in the fields of law enforcement and the military as interrogation aids, as well as within specialized training such as SERE. In each case, the environment and physical comfort of the targeted participant are manipulated to lower their resistance, gain their trust, or ultimately obtain some concession.

Moving from science to science fiction, you can find ready parallels to controlling serotonin and oxytocin with the Pax used to curb aggression on the Outer Rim planet Miranda in Joss Whedon’s Serenity; the drug Prozium in Equilibrium and Soma in Brave New World; and more obscurely, the hormones produced by alien Powers that activate the ‘god module’ (aka neurotheology) in humans from Walter Jon Williams’ Voice of the Whirlwind. In each, the population is effectively controlled through their own neurochemistry by instilling languor, reducing aggression, suppressing emotion, etc.

Remember the instant photo? Almost four months ago, Polaroid announced that they were no longer planning to make their trademark instant film, following the end-of-life status for their instant cameras last year. instant film stocks are projected to last only through 2009. They have also shut down their other film lines, including large-format and professional-grade lines. At the time, they announced a partnership with ZINK (Zero Ink) Imaging to market a new product based around their crystal-based dye paper. And now they have announced the PoGo portable photo printer, due later this summer:

Polaroid PoGo

The PoGo - short for "Polaroid On the Go," a seemingly unnecessary repetition of the cultural meaning of "Polaroid" - is about the size of a compact digital camera and can accept digital prints from camera phones via BlueTooth or from PictBridge-capable cameras by cable. Rather than normal dye- or ink-based photo printers that rely on quickly-exhausted cartridges, the Zink process embeds all of the color technology within the special photo paper itself. Embedded dye crystals are manufactured molecules that generate the necessary additive hues to create color prints under heat. The paper currently produces "2×3 in. borderless sticky-back prints" in about a minute.

Despite the claim of "fade-resistant, long-lasting images," it will be worth testing just how long these instant photos hold up, like their spiritual predecessors and other home printers. The entire class of photos that have been produced by digital cameras and never committed to professional printing raise rather wide-ranging questions about future provenance. What will we hand down to our grandchildren in place of unfinished photo albums and shoeboxes of snapshots? Will we still be able to read even now-ubiquitous formats like JPEG and the various RAW flavors in 50 or 100 years, like we can with earlier generations of photography going back to examples like daguerrotypes? As with the physical book, the printed photograph requires no special reader, no software, no compatibility matrix. Until flexible, non-volatile media like E-Ink or Zink develop equivalent endurance, we risk losing entire generations of family history to the junkbin of obsolete media.

Clay Shirky, previously featured here for his book Here Comes Everybody, has provoked a lot of interest through another proposition. Adapted from a conference talk related to Web 2.0, Shirky knit together a surprising combination of elements identified in the title:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

His first contention is that television sitcoms served the same sociological midwifery role during the American post-WWII ‘leisure age’ as gin during the Industrial Revolution. First it might help to understand just what gin had to do with anything. (more…)

Albums added in April: 10,769

I hope you got your Rolling Stones fix last month, since they’ve now been stripped out of the catalog for “events outside of our control” according to eMusic. This reversal is part of a larger issue affecting eMusic’s catalogue, which invisibly loses some portion of its releases even as it publicly reveals all of new additions. Just among the artists I note below, at least one is a repost of an album by Future Sound of London that had previously been offered and then removed at some point, plus all of Ladytron’s albums apart from the new “Ghosts” single have likewise vanished. The unfortunate lesson is that you can’t assume that your “Save for Later” selections will actually still be there when you have the downloads to spare.

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Apropos for the previous post (on Darwinian adaptation among malware), the article itself attracted one of those keyword-matching comments from an apparent spamblog (somewhat different from straightforward splogs). I had not previously heard of these before operating this blog in other than stealth mode, so here’s how I infer they function just by observation:

1. A new post is scanned, either via its feed or one of the aggregator services like Technorati, looking for certain keywords.
2. A corresponding post is created on the spamblog with a generic blurb like “[author] had an interesting post about [keyword]” and a short 1- or 2-line excerpt centering on the keyword match.
3. A comment is submitted to the originating blog, linking back to the spamblog.
4. The spamblog post is then able to attract traffic either through clickthroughs from the comments thread, or from increased PageRank from Google since their blog gradually increases its network of keyword-linked sites.

The ultimate purpose is still simply to gain visitors which in turn trigger ad revenue through a combination of Google text ads, banner ads, and other pay-to-host content. The spamblog itself is often a default template, e.g. the Kubrick WordPress theme, consisting only of these short linked posts. For blogs that either don’t moderate comments or who don’t scrutinize excerpting sites individually, growth is mostly automatic. The adaptation is that they propagate links without the prior telltale markers of comment spam like overt sales messages included in the actual comment text.

So far I’ve seen these keyword comments triggered by an unusual set of terms: ‘elevator operator,’ ‘turquoise jewelry,’ a ’sequel to 5 People You Meet in Heaven,’ ‘Apple,’ ‘zebrafish,’ and ‘plumbing license.’ As an exercise for the reader, I leave it to you to guess which original posts generated each of those matches (hint: keywords don’t have to be sequential). I’m also curious whether having listed those now all together, I will get a repeat entry of all prior spam comment attempts.

This brings to mind what I am sure has already been codified into the equivalent of Sturgeon’s Law, which would go something like: “Any sufficiently popular mainstream communications system will generate spam” or perhaps the more prescriptive, “A communication system can be considered mainstream once it attracts spam.” Spam is generally considered to have originated with electronic systems like e-mail and Usenet forums, but extending the definition backwards, one could potentially designate parallels like telemarketing and robocalls for telephones and junk mail for postal service as examples. Did telegraph operators ever suffer from unsolicited commercial Morse Code transmissions? Certainly spam has gained tremendous genetic diversity in jumping to every emerging communication form—chat spam (first IRC then IM), forum spam (first newsgroups then web), mobile phone spam via SMS, online games, search engines (aka spamdexing), blog spam, and even video-sharing sites like YouTube. Twitter? Check.

Part of the original blame can be placed on the idealism of academic groups like the IETF who established standards for communication protocols like SMTP and NNTP without incorporating more robust authentication and authorization to deter spoofing and other common tactics. Except, of course, that those standards were created long before the very notion of a commercial Internet had been considered, and the online community was small enough to police itself by etiquette alone. Certainly we could assert that newer protocols should learn the lessons of the past and instill greater protection against potential abuses, right? Except, instead, the rapid evolution of spam in response to antispam efforts has created ’superbugs’ and an extensive evolutionary toolbox of techniques that can thwart most any systemic precaution. Just like our immune system and pharmacology have developed to deal with ever more sophisticated organic threats, inspiring ever stronger virii and bacteria, so the race continues between platform developers and those who would distribute spam over them. It is effectively now almost impossible to create a communications system that is actually usable, capable of reaching mainstream acceptance, and totally immune to spam-like behavior. Instead, like the common cold, we now aim instead to reach a détente where we can take steps to prevent infection and minimize symptoms, but no longer envision a ‘cure for spam.’

A fascinating microcosm of technical Darwinism is the ceaseless escalation of sophistication between malware authors and anti-virus vendors. Formerly solo practitioners acting out of bravado or malcontent, malware developers are increasingly dedicated professionals bankrolled by organized crime syndicates or even governments in areas like Eastern Europe and Asia. With the huge financial incentive in identity fraud, online theft, and electronic blackmail, black hat hackers aim to exploit the twin vectors of technical vulnerability and human laziness. Anti-virus firms meanwhile have developed a huge market base by playing a largely defensive game against new attack types, constantly scouring the underground community for new examples of attack vectors and building massive databases of ’signatures’ or ‘fingerprints’ of specific variants. Yet just like organic mutation, each new form of defense is the inspiration for a variety of alternatives that seek to bypass the Maginot lines of AV software.

Botnet agent plays lost sheep to avoid detection | The Register

The Register reports on one such development in the ongoing mutation of the strain ‘Kraken’ (AKA Bobax) bot. Earlier botnets were susceptible to interruption by attacking not the zombie clients but, in military parlance, going after their C&C (command and control) elements that issue the bot its orders—attack a certain host via distributed denial-of-service (DDOS), for example. These were often IRC servers that allowed pseudonymous communication via protected messages. Yet IRC is, with the advent of IM and Web-based chat, now itself something of an anomaly that an AV program could view as suspicious.

The Kraken adaptation adopts dynamic DNS through generated domain names, passing encrypted commands through HTTP further obfuscated with bogus headers to fool SPI-capable firewalls. In this fashion, the bot homes in on the current location of its control server without having any hardcoded lists that can be used to target them for shutdown. The Australian firm PC Tools that analyzed the new code compared the process to the way a lost sheep tries to locate its shepherd (hence the article’s title). Similarly, new variations of P2P software have attempted to replace the fragile centralized tracker with distributed databases and multi-hop obfuscation through efforts like TOR and I2P.

Kraken also employs a random word generator to vary its infection host filenames, which spread through IM networks like MSN Messenger. This is a tactic previously adopted by spammers, who in turn were responding to naive Bayesian filtering built into antispam engines like SpamAssassin.

A parallel story at The Register notes a new kind of SQL injection attacks that targets DATE and NUMBER fields. Previously SQL injections exploited unchecked parameters or syntactic tricks to pass SQL code, often limited to text-based fields like VARCHAR. The recent nihaorr* mass attack on older ASP-based sites, for example, used a combination of techniques: the injection was appended as a POST in place of a standard GET query, overloading the request with a 4000-character hex string set within a CAST function. Decoding the hex to text revealed a procedural cursor that trawled the sysobjects DB for any char-based columns, to which it then proceeded to append rogue JS code via UPDATEs. Since most remedies for SQL injection have centered around validating text-based input, this variation bypasses such defenses by manipulating date and number data routines in Oracle’s PL/SQL.

Not content to be left on the defensive, particularly with suspicions that certain governments could be building up their own stockpiles of zombie PCs to act as a botnet in the effect of a (sigh) cyberwar, the US Air Force Cyber Command (AFCYBER) has recently published their consideration of mustering a military botnet. Ars Technica reviews the salient points of Col. Charles Williamson’s proposal, including the need for offensive capability (essentially to attack the attacker) in light of the indefensibility of our present infrastructure, and the potential political fallout were we to, say, pingflood France due to a DDOS mounted from a botnet there controlled by a rogue group elsewhere. The implications for this are somewhat provocative—even if AFCYBER were to build a managed botnet out of decommissioned military PCs, would some other branch like the NSA or CIA also receive a secret mandate to develop ‘offsite assets’ by infecting civilian PCs in other countries? Will some portion of future conflicts consist of shadowy agents provocateur wielding heavily anonymized zombie PC armies trying to provoke retaliation against the enemy’s allies by launching DDOS attacks from within their civilian networks?

In yet another Daring Fireball-inspired tract, Charlie Wood asks why Apple appears to escape the "innovator’s dilemma" presented in Clayton Christensen’s eponymous work. The idea is a follow-on from Christensen’s earlier depiction of ‘disruptive technology-cum-innovations’ and how they evolve within a market (similar to Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions). Once the disruptive paradigm has established a beachhead, its progenitor often overdoes its development and in turn loses out to second-tier players that leapfrog it by adopting the innovation at a ‘good enough’ level, undercutting the market leader. Yet Apple, at least in its current incarnation, seems to avoid that pitfall.

Moonwatcher: Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

Wood argues that this is in due to Apple distinguishing itself by design, which appeals to taste and is harder to usurp than a typical feature matrix. This certainly helps explain why, for example, the iPod has utterly eclipsed any imitators (which add features at the expense of usability) and why the iPhone was able to dominate mindshare so quickly in an established smartphone segment (which has always buried functionality behind clunky interfaces).

However, another straightforward business answer is that Apple acts to undercut itself rather than leaving that to a competitor. For example, when the iPod Mini was the bestselling flash-based music player, they discontinued it and introduced the Nano, which reconsidered the Mini in both design and features rather than just making minor changes. With the iPhone less than a year old, already intense speculation mounts about a likely successor with enhancements like 3G wireless, effectively hamstringing competition which may already have 3G-capable handsets. To re-iterate: even the rumor of a future iPhone feature is somehow perceived (at least in the breathless press coverage) as superior to other brands already in the field.

Perhaps even more apt than Wood’s own rationalization is the observation made in a comment by Martin Pilkington that:

"the problem with most companies once they become larger is

a) they become more bureaucratic
b) everyone starts to protect their own territory
c) marketing takes over or they ignore marketing"

This you may recognize as a business-specific case of systemantics, where the business effectively ends up at war with itself in unconscious internecine competition for resources. He also adds the specific point—which has also been espoused by Steve Jobs in interviews about the Apple design philosophy—that they do not add features to products merely to reach feature parity in reaction to competition, or through typical focus group artificiality, but through something more akin to user cases. That is, they imagine how people want to use a device, and then build a feature to make that possible in as intuitive a way as possible. As far back as 1998 (when their resurgent success was much less assured), Jobs told BusinessWeek that:

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

Is there a better shorthand for product innovation than ‘thinking of what people want before they knew they wanted it’?