Well, no. There's some truth to this. I'm part of the reason why.

See, I am what you could call an "architect" and "cloud services engineer". I prefer the term, "Distributed Systems Specialist." I've been focused on this since I learned under a bunch of ex-Yahoo! engineers at a company called Powerset, quite some time ago now. While my story is maybe unusual, my job and my general set of values are anything but.

And my goal is to eliminate operations personnel, "Storage Specialists", and to hasten the disappearance of the dying breed of "one machine data scientist." I'm also hoping in the next 5 years we can flush out most of the unmanaged language programmers from any place they don't need to be (unless performance constraints are so tight they outweigh potential security and scheduling implications, I resist the use of languages like C++*, C and Fortran). If life is truly sweet, we'll phase out Java or at least threaten to so Oracle will stop brutally mismanaging that project.

The "why" of it is complicated and reasons vary, but in general I'm very busy tearing down old crappy processes and infrastructures to make way for lightweight processes and efficient distributed infrastructure. This means things like making engineers have deploy rights (and responsibilities!) on their own code, making sure that data is effectively managed so that it's secure but still accessible to the folks who want to do statistical analysis, and that code gets written quickly and confidently.

So yeah, if you (being any reader) one of those people I am your enemy and the beneficiary of this climate all at the same time.

The source code in the presentation is for an off-the-shelf (and quite popular) microcontroller set that is sold at Maker Fairs to hobbyist teens. The entire protocol and the weakness of said protocol is exposed in said source code.

Just because you cannot imagine how he did it doesn't mean that it's unimaginable that someone could do this. It simply means you're out of his league.