Techmeme: Printer malware: print a malicious document, expose your whole LAN (Cory Doctorow/Boing Boing)

1:35 AM ET, January 2, 2012

Top Items:

Lauren Goode / AllThingsD:

Uber CEO Responds to New Year's Eve Complaints, Plans More Surge Pricing — Uber, the San Francisco-based start-up behind a smartphone app that allows users to request car service, had some users uber-angry today over the fares they paid for rides on New Year's Eve.

Thanks:laurengoode

Semil Shah / TechCrunch:

Uber's New Year's Eve Surcharges Demonstrate The Harsh Reality Of Dynamic Pricing — I woke up this morning to tweets from Uber customers nationwide who felt taken for a ride, literally and figuratively, after requesting an Uber on one of the busiest nights of the year.

Thanks:alexia

Dom Anthony Narducci / Quora:

What happened with Uber on New Year's Eve? — Answer: Some things went wrong and some things went right last night. — As for how the prices got that high, at a super simplistic level, it was because things went right. The concept behind surge pricing (explained in a number of Uber blog posts like http …

Brenden Mulligan / Starting Up:
Redesigning the Uber Surge Pricing Screen

Discussion: Uber Blog, Uber Blog, @aubs, @dwhly, @birdstweets, @stevestreza, @laurengoode, @marcslove, @bmull, @jason, @uber_bos, @travisk, @gaberivera, @travisk and @uber

Brian X. Chen / New York Times:

H.P.'s TouchPad Tablet Was Bound to Be a Flop, Some Say — The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year's biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple's iPad …

Discussion: Electronista

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Still Looking For A New Year's Resolution? How About Learning To Code ... After eating something greasy to get rid of last night's hangover, many of you are probably in the middle of writing your New Year's resolutions. Well, here's a good one (especially considering that the tech sector seems …

Discussion: Betabeat, A VC, @paulg and @parislemon

Elinor Mills / CNET:

Facebook hands out White Hat debit cards to hackers — This is the Visa debit card Facebook is giving to some security researchers for reporting bugs. — A few companies pay money to bug hunters. But Facebook is giving out something more unique than just a check.

Dana Wollman / Engadget:

Sony cuts Tablet S price by $100, now starts at $400 for 16GB — New year, new pricing strategy? We just got word that Sony's cut the price of its 9.4-inch Tablet S by $100, so that it now starts at $400 for the 16GB model, and $500 for the 32GB flavor. The move follows a temporary $50 price cut …

Discussion: The Verge, CNET, BetaNews, T3 News, MobileWhack.com, Liliputing, HotHardware.com News, Electronista and AndroidOS.in

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:

Printer malware: print a malicious document, expose your whole LAN — One of the most mind-blowing presentations at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) was Ang Cui's Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers.

Brian X. Chen / Bits:

Text Messaging Is in Decline in Some Countries — Perhaps to the chagrin of cellphone carriers, all signs point to text messaging's continuing its decline in several parts of the world. — In Finland, there was a significant drop on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year for texting …

Genevieve Bell / BBC:

Viewpoint: AI will change our relationship with tech — Interaction and experience research director, Intel Labs — The coming year may bring cameras that know how to make people look as good as possible — In 1984, American movie director James Cameron imagined a world …

Mark Gurman / 9to5Mac:

Apple TV iOS applications now running natively at fullscreen 720p resolution in developer port — We broke the news yesterday that developers Steven Troughton-Smith and the TheMudKip were working on bringing iOS applications to the Apple TV in a native experience.

Christina Bonnington / Gadget Lab:

First Siri, Now Threat Detection: Inside SRI's Amazing R&D — Pat Lincoln, director of SRI's Computer Science Laboratory, stands next to a huge display running BotHunter, SRI's botnet detection software. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired — Who invented Siri? — Like it says on the box... I was designed by Apple in California.

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