There is absolutely zero chance he figured out the pull protocol via telnet. I will happily pay $10,000 to anyone could do that with zero access to BK. Can't be done. If I'm wrong, I'll pay up. But I'll have a lot of questions that can't be answered.
So he cheated, he got Linus to run BK commands at his house and he snooped the network. He had no legal access to those bytes. Without those snoops, no chance he reverse engineered it.
As I have seen over and over, when the open source people want something, they will twist themselves in knots to justify getting it, legality be damned.
How about you be better than this and admit that open source is not without its skeletons?