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The fact that the author is essentially thanking Sony for securing devices against them is something I find a bit baffling, unless it's some deep sarcasm I'm not seeing, or thanks for not making it too secure.

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The reason you're not seeing what he means is that you didn't grasp that the rest of the paragraph explains why he is thanking Sony.

He is thanking them for the opportunity to learn so much.

Yup, when I hacked the Kindle, it was a weekend's work. It was fun and challenging work, but not educating as this was.

There are those who reverse engineer encryptions, network protocols, and in this case hardware and learn more about the technologies used than anyone else applying for said job (just as an example). People learn invaluable things from this scene. Yifan Lu has done some interesting stuff, and I have seen others do great things that have led to their growth in the Reverse Engineering scene. Some go as simple as recreating a close sourced websites PHP back-end (or recreating it in PHP) and they learn plenty to get them started. The tougher the security the more you have to understand what you're working against, the more you learn.

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