The mention of the problem I had seen first turns out to have been on slashdot, not boingboing (which I figured out after much searching at boingboing to find the link again.) This is the link to their link to the story, but story linked in the link (whew) has been removed. But IN that old story (that I was having to summarize from memory) the poster had, after noticing the worn paint, hooked up a multimeter to the two tabs and found that a small current could flow between the two tabs.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...hes-the-Kindle