Thursday, July 9, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Response to IEEE paper that characterizes P2P as undesirable and illegal

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:11 AM PDT

Kyle Brady, a computer science student, sends us, "a critique of a major IEEE article by Lawrence G. Roberts where he automatically assumes P2P traffic is illegal, unwanted, and should be filtered - then develops the technology to do so."
Consider, for a moment, the issue most often cited for "traffic shaping", the practice of filtering a users traffic based on the type and source: legality of content. While there is an abundance of content with questionable copyright origins based on the current interpretations of the DMCA (in America), there is also a sea of legal content being acquired by the same means: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and a number of other musical artists have experimented with a freely available online distribution method, in addition to countless young movie producers that are only interested in their content being available and seen.

How can network monitoring practices differentiate between "legal" and "illegal" P2P traffic? Filtering by content source, such as a band's official website vs. IsoHunt, is impractical - the content available via the official source is likely licensed for free distribution and sharing by other means. Filtering by traffic size, as in number of bytes transferred, is a gray area at best - setting an arbitrary size for acceptable P2P traffic, or any type of traffic, creates artificial pricing levels, not to mention potentially endorsing the acquisition of questionably sourced content. There is really only one option left, and it is what most ISPs choose in such cases: filter by traffic type.

I've never understood the ISP/admin approach to P2P that says, "We've provided you with a pipe so you can access the Internet, but stop accessing the Internet so much!" If users want P2P, then P2P is what makes paying for an ISP valuable, so why would ISPs want to reduce its availability? That's like a phone company that discovers that teenagers use phones to send a lot of texts to one another, overwhelming their capacity (based on assumptions about how much text users will want to send) who then throttles text-sending rather than changing their assumptions about use-patterns.

Incorrect Base Assumptions About Network Management (Thanks, Kyle!)

Rupert Murdoch reporters in the UK illegally hacked thousands of peoples' data

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:05 AM PDT

British journalists working for Murdoch papers have been on a crime spree, hiring private eyes to illegally hack into the voicemail and data of thousands of people, including " tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills"; Murdoch has paid out over £1M so far to hush it up. The head of the Conservative party's communications is a former Murdoch exec who from the time that much of this crime was committed by his staffers.
Senior editors are among those implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Coulson was deputy and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.

Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

As civil liberties campaigner Dr Ian Brown notes:
There are two particularly troubling aspects to this story. The Metropolitan Police, Crown Prosecution Service and Information Commissioner's Office all had prima facie evidence of these crimes, but have declined to take action against News Group. And, mobile phone companies continue to allow access to messages using voicemail PINs set to defaults that are apparently known throughout the media. Perhaps in future:

1. Law enforcement agencies will take action against those discovered to be breaking the law, whether or not they work for powerful newspaper groups?

2. Mobile phone companies will not leave their customers' communications wide open to abuse?

3. Government agencies and companies will think a little more carefully before building up large collections of sensitive personal data that will inevitably be sold to the highest bidder?

Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims

Australian anti-censorship video trying to get on Qantas

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:00 AM PDT

Itsumishi sez, "Remember that absurd Internet Filtering Scheme Stephen Conroy and the Australian Government has been continuing to push onto the Australian population? Well GetUp the amazing organisation that has been involved in a lot of great campaigns in Australia has created a very hilarious advertisement they're hoping to get onto every Qantas flight in the country while for next sitting in Parliament. The idea is that most politicians will be flying at some time during this time and they'll be a captive audience. Anyway, the ad is brilliant and they need donations to get it on air, please help!"

Censor this? (Thanks, Itsumishi!)

Previously:


Pneumatic alarm-clock that wakes you by bouncing the bed up and down

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:52 AM PDT

I wish the video was embeddable, as this has to be seen to be believed: the alarm-clock is attached to a pneumatic gas-lift under a bed that picks it up and bounces it up and down like a lowrider car:

Built by reader "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he "mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning." Continue reading to see it in action."
World's Biggest Alarm Clock Shakes You Out of Bed, is Computer-Controlled (via /.)
Previously:


Creative Commons licensed secret society for promoting girls' literacy

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:46 AM PDT

AD sez, "Girls Guild is an ancient secret society complete with a mythological back-story set in Atlantis, secret code and handshake, nemesis, and (perhaps) soon-to-be-ubiquitous symbol -- but with a twist: all of the secrets, iconography and legends are available for retooling, embellishment and propagation under a Creative Commons license."

This looks like fun, notwithstanding that Girls Guild appears to be so ancient as to have predated the apostrophe.

Introducing Girls Guild (Thanks, A. D. Ammann!)


Hello, space rendezvous

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:28 AM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

I'm not sure what this video about, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with astrophysics. "Docking," by Mato Atom, who describes himself as a "hobby astronomer without a telescope." (Thanks, Matt!)

Sci-fi couture on the runway

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:11 AM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

 SyFyGaultier.jpg A little "Blade Runner," a little "Metropolis," a little "Coneheads," things got science-fiction-inspired on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway yesterday during the Fall 2009 Paris couture shows. (Image credit: Left and right: Monica Feudi; center: Simone Manzo)

@BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com)

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:35 PM PDT

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)


More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Death by Chocolate (no, really): worker dies in hot cocoa mixing vat

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:24 AM PDT

A 29-year old worker died today when he fell into a giant vat of hot chocolate at a New Jersey factory. Hope someone at the scene had the presence of mind to question the oompah-loompahs.
_46031953_0906_new_jersey_camden.gifA spokesman for the local prosecutor's office said the man appeared to have died instantly from a blow to his head by a paddle mixing the chocolate. His colleagues at the factory tried to shut down the mixer, but were too late. Local journalists met some of the workers in the car park, covered in chocolate and seemingly in dismay.
BBC report here (Thanks, Antinous)

Guatemala: Charges against Twitter user finally dropped

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 09:37 PM PDT

jeanfer.jpg
Oh, this is righteous and terrific news. Remember Jean Anleu, the mild-mannered, book-loving, code-writing geek who was jailed in May by the Guatemalan government over a single tweet he posted during that country's political crisis?

He's a free guy now. The case against him was thrown out today by a Guatemalan appeals court. He has been absolved of all charges.

Prensa Libre has a comprehensive article in Spanish here, and this link takes you to Spanish-language audio of the proceedings today. Friends are still collecting funds to cover @jeanfer's sizeable legal bills. If you care to donate, you can do so to his friend Manolo's PayPal account (manolo@manoloweb.net, yes I have vetted it, and yes it's real).

Previously:


Wal-Mart's Twitter Account Comes with a 3,379-word Terms of Use Agreement

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 09:03 PM PDT

tou.jpgOnly lawyers, EULA collectors and legal obsessives will find this funny, but it cracked me up: care to access the 140-character pearls of wisdom streaming forth from Wal-Mart's Twitter account? Well, first you have to agree to the 3,379-word Terms of Use agreement that comes with it. I know, I know, a lot of big corporate entities on social networking sites likely put forth equally verbose TOUs, but -- a "Twitter Discussion Policy"? Awesome overkill. It all starts here. (via @zephoria)

Appreciation of "jumping hour" watches that display time as linear

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 06:17 PM PDT

On the Watchismo blog, Mitch celebrates the launch of the Urwerk King Cobra CC1, a remake of the original "jumping hour" watch, explaining why he's so fascinated with these remarkable, largely extinct timepieces.

Time is usually - nearly always - displayed by a circular indication: one dial and two (or three) with the time displayed around a perpetual circle. However, this 360° representation of time goes against everything we learnt as we grew up drawing a straight line on a blank page and marking it Past, Present and Future. Why do we think of time as travelling in a straight line yet display it rotating around a circle? The answer is straightforward: mechanisms that continually rotate are much simpler to produce than those that trace a straight line then return to zero. In fact, the latter is so difficult that, until now, nobody has ever managed to develop a production wristwatch with true retrograde linear displays.
Urwerk King Cobra CC1 Reintrepretation of 1958 Patek Philippe Cobra Prototype Linear Retrograde Cylinder Jumping Hour Watch
Previously:


Pope damns medical patents

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 05:57 PM PDT

The Pope's latest encyclical (a kind of churchy APA) decries "excessive zeal for ... intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."
Section 22 of the letter, entitled "Human Development in Our Time," laid out the Pope's vision of human development goals. It also highlighted the failings of the current system, citing rigid ideology, consumerist "superdevelopment", corruption, and "cultural models and social norms of behavior .... which hinder the process of development." Casting a strikingly pragmatic tone, the encyclical underscores the complexity of development issues, which "should prompt us to liberate ourselves from ideologies, which oversimplify reality in artifical ways, and ... lead us to examine objectively the full human dimension of the problems."
Pope Benedict XVI encyclical letter denounces excessive zeal for assertions of intellectual property rights in knowledge

Australian govt memo, 1968: Women become "spinster battle axes;" "men usually mellow"

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:20 AM PDT

Nat sez, "Spinster battlaxe Skud passed me this 1968 minute from the Director of the Trade Commissioner of Australia explaining why women are ineligible for postings. It's a jawdropalicious blast from the sexist past":
Even conceding these points, a woman could not stay young and attractive for ever, and later on could well become a problem.

(vii) A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows.

Nat continues, "Bearing in mind this sage advice, I've already begun to regretfully decline my daughter's requests for education and social opportunities, explaining to her that "she could not be regarded as a long-term investment in the same sense as we regard" her brother."

Minute to the Director, Trade Commissioner Service (Australia) (Thanks, Nat!)

Vancouver Olympics to feature US-style "free speech zones"

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 05:52 PM PDT

Craig sez, "Looks like Vancouver is getting free speech areas just like the RNC! Yipee! It's so nice of them to set up these areas. I'm sure that even though they're optional, all us polite Canadian folks will be encouraged to full advantage of the designated areas."

Good to see the Olympics upholding its tradition of fostering international brotherhood through brutal authoritarian crackdowns, venal rent-seeking, and remorseless forced relocation of unsightly poor people.

The head of security for the 2010 Games, RCMP assistant commissioner Bud Mercer, told Vancouver city council on Tuesday, however, that protesters will not be required to limit their activities to the areas.

You're free to use them, if you like, but anywhere you participate in lawful protest is legal and lawful in Canada. It doesn't have to be in a free speech area," said Mercer.

2010 Olympic security plans include 'free speech areas' Some homeless to be moved out of security zones (Thanks, Craig!)
Previously:


Robert Charles Wilson podcast

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 05:49 PM PDT

Mitch writes in with news of his latest Copper Robot podcast, "Robert Charles Wilson discusses his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America. It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun. I also talked to Wilson about his 24-year career, past books including Darwinia and Spin, his writing process and favorite tools, and how working for a Canadian civil rights education was great education for a writer."

Science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson (Thanks, Mitch!)

Previously:


Travis Louie's "Monster?" group art show

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 02:43 PM PDT

Monsterweb Images C Garro Allure2 Monsterweb Images Bobeggleton
Monsterweb Images A Rokuro Lj2 Monsterweb Images A Ojessica-Joslin Phineas
Travis Louie, whose art we've featured many times on BB, is curating a large group show opening this Saturday, July 11, at CoproGalley in Santa Monica, CA. The theme and title of the show: "Monster?" Seen above, clockwise from top left, Mark Garro's "Allure," Bob Eggleton's "Eye Monster," Audrey Kawasaki's ""While You're Sleeping," and Jessica Joslin's "Phineas." The entire show is viewable online as well. Monster? show preview (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Previously:


Watch out for that lampshade!

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 01:19 PM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

If you liked "RoboGeisha," you'll love "Hausu"! I don't know anything about this movie, except that it was made in 1977, it involves a murderous lampshade, and you should probably not watch it if you don't like blood fountains, disembodied body parts, light fixtures, screaming cats, screaming cat paintings, or screaming cat paintings spewing blood. Maybe in the comments somebody would like to tell us what they're hollering about? Probably NSFW due to some disembodied boobs. (Via Buzzfeed)

Man, our president is cool.

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 01:04 PM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

 o16_48429278.jpg The Big Picture takes a big pixel look back at President Obama's first 167 days in office. He looks cool in pretty much every picture. Well played, Barry, well played. (Image credit: Samantha Appleton)

Fun times for the Bicycle Film Festival

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 11:53 AM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

Sure, it's a tad Bat for Lashes, but who's keeping track? This delightful promo spot for the Bicycle Film Festival, a "celebration of bicycles through film, art, and music" underway in Minneapolis as of today through July 12, was brought to you by this isn't happiness, one of my favorite blogs.

Is that a shoe on your head or are you just happy to see me?

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 11:33 AM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

picassominotaur.jpg From the lovely collection of self-portraiture by Kimiko Yoshida. This one has something to do with minotaurs and Picasso. (Via NOTCOT)

Music and the mind

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 11:08 AM PDT

Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:
The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids' ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.

Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.

The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.
"Why Music Moves Us"

Previously:


God Bless America

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:51 AM PDT

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

1076974504.jpg Artist: Zina Saunders, "Alaskan Roulette," July 4, 2009. (Thanks, Zina!)

Eco-friendly textile coffins

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:50 AM PDT

Images Swaledale
A textile company and coffin manufacturer are jointly introducing a new line of coffins made from wool or organic cotton. From a press release:
This is an innovative coffin and something completely new for the alternative coffin market, but the use of wool in burials is nothing new. The Burial in Wool Act of 1667 made it a legal requirement for the dead to be buried in woollen shrouds in an attempt to boost the struggling woollen industry of the time. With the current social eco agenda, rising concerns on the environmental impact of burials and this innovative product, the industry has come full circle."
And from the description of the casket seen here, the Swaledale model:
The Swaledale coffin is made in Yorkshire using pure new wool, supported on a strong recycled cardboard frame. Wool is a fibre with a true "green" lineage that is both sustainable and biodegradable. The interior is generously lined with cotton and attractively edged in jute.

Independently tested and accredited for strength and weight bearing, the Swaledale's unique design combines the highest environmental standards with an attractive and soft feel. Designed to differ from the traditional wooden coffin, it offers a contemporary style with comfortable handling. The concept is completed with a personalised embroidered woollen name plate. All the materials used in the Swaledale coffin are readily biodegradable and suitable for cremation and all types of burial.
Hainsworth "Natural Legacy" coffins

Previously:


Rice paddy crop art of the year

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:31 AM PDT

Images Rice Art 2009 4
It's the season of rice paddy art in Japan and Pink Tentacle has collected some exquisite examples! The massive artworks are grown through the strategic arrangement of rice plants of varying hues. From Pink Tentacle:
Images Rice Art 2009 2 The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori prefecture village of Inakadate, which has earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry. This year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall there.
Rice paddy crop art (2009) (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Previously:


Rushkoff: "Google's War On The PC"

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 10:30 AM PDT

Doug Rushkoff is bullish on Google's plans to launch a Chrome OS (I blogged the news here on Boing Boing last night).

Snip from his essay today in The Daily Beast:

google-chrome-logo.jpgIn a sense, Google is just bringing computing back to the way it was supposed to be. When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

What Jobs didn't happen to notice was that the computer operating system he witnessed and copied wasn't meant as a way to organize the software and data on a single machine--it was actually a way for computers on a network to share resources. Not only files, but the software to work with them. The computers themselves were to be just dummies--terminals from which to run software and access files that were stored on someone else's expensive computer.

Instead, our operating systems have moved away from sharing and towards ownership. We buy a big powerful machine and do everything on it ourselves. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: they create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on. (It's as if the car companies and asphalt industry worked together, building roads that required new kinds of cars, and then cars that required new kinds of roads.)

Google's War On The PC (Daily Beast)

Rushkoff is also the author of the recently-released book Life, Inc..

Previously:


Collecting dead souls in social media

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 04:51 PM PDT

Gogolsoullll-1 Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

Yesterday I posted an essay on Socialstructing--creating organizations around social connections rather than against them. I believe these types of organizational forms are growing and diffusing rapidly throughout the economy. However, I do not see them as panaceas from all our ills since they have a potential to bring with them new kinds of inequalities, exclusions, and Ponzi schemes. So this post looks at potential unintended consequences of socialstructing.

One of the best things about speaking Russian (possibly the only thing), is that it gives you an ability to access Russian literature in the original. Over the years I've tried many different translations of Russian writers and was disappointed every time. Nothing compares to the original. Maybe it is impossible to do justice to these texts because many Russian words are so deeply rooted in a uniquely Russian context and life circumstances. What I love about writers such as Gogol and Chekhov is that in portraying life in 19th century Russia they managed to capture universal themes of human inner struggles, desires, and life ironies. They created prototypes of characters and circumstances that are as real today as they were 150 years ago. People just work through those circumstances with a whole new suite of tools and technologies.

That leads me to one of my favorite pieces of Russian literature -- Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, a novel first published in 1842. The story revolves around the exploits of Chichikov, a personality populating the lower rungs of the Russian society. Driven by a desire to enhance his social standing, Chichikov develops an ingenious scheme. He goes around Russian villages buying up records of dead serfs. It's a brilliant idea that capitalized on a unique and grotesque feature of the feudal Russian society -- ownership by landlords of the people who lived and worked on their land.

The number of "souls" one owned was a measure of one's economic and social status. Landowners in fact paid taxes based on how many serfs or "souls" they owned. The government kept count of owned "souls" and this count was based on government census numbers. Unfortunately, the census took place only infrequently and many landowners ended up paying taxes on their dead serfs. Grasping an opportune moment between the two censuses, Chichikov bought records of these dead souls from landowners eager to lighten their own tax burdens. Papers certifying Chichikov's ownership of 400 "souls" rapidly elevated Chichikov's status: landed gentry opened their homes to him, tried to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrated him at town functions. And all it took was a record of ownership of hundreds of "souls." So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more "souls" for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.

Dead Souls

Previously:


PES animations: Human Skateboard and Fireworks

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 09:06 AM PDT




We've featured the incredible stop-motion animation of PES before. Here are two I hadn't seen before, "Human Skateboard" and "Fireworks," that are my new favorites. eatPES

Previously:


United Breaks Guitars, the complaint anthem

Posted: 08 Jul 2009 09:49 PM PDT


Udpate: United Airlines has responded. Bottom line: YouTube complaint videos appear to work.

Instead of a complaint letter, the band "Sons of Maxwell" have posted a music video aimed at United Airlines over the destruction of one of their guitars on a trip last year:

[We] were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.
United Breaks Guitars (YouTube, via Graham Linehan)
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