This is a nice hacking story. But when you have physical access and expertise you can hack anything. So I don't understand what's so sad about it. I do advocate security in depth, and they should probably have added a few more "layers" of security, like hide the cables and encrypt the network traffic. But then he could just use a screwdriver or pull the encryption key from the device, etc. But they probably judged that stopping kids from playing with it would be enough. The guy is a freaking firmware developer and security expert!