Edwin van Andel’s core message is that technology hypes repeatedly promise to “change everything,” but the underlying security problems, human behaviours, and attacker creativity tend to persist. He opens by positioning himself as deliberately grumpy about AI and skeptical of claims that AI will eliminate hackers or fundamentally transform security. He jokes that AI answers can be unusable, citing a prompt about “US wars and conflict in the past thirty years” that produced odd results, and states plainly that “the core of security remains human.” For him, humans and hackers remain essential, even as AI becomes another hyped technology layered onto old patterns.

The talk then moves through Edwin’s own background and credibility in hacker culture. He introduces himself as Edwin van Andel, also known as Yav Sek, a member of the “guild of the grumpy old hackers,” and references hacking Trump in 2016, DEFCON communities, Zerocopter’s network of around 400 selected hackers, and his newer cybersecurity marketing agency. The opening is informal and comedic, but it establishes the perspective behind the talk: someone deeply embedded in offensive security, suspicious of overblown promises, and fond of showing how old problems keep returning in new forms. His story about working on the DEFCON badge and receiving a congratulatory video from an older hacker figure reinforces that the session is rooted in hacker history and community.

From there, Edwin begins a historical tour of technologies that were expected to transform society. He uses Amazon’s Dash button as a recent failed hype example, joking about a button that could accidentally order thousands of condoms. He then rewinds to photography, arguing that cameras changed portrait-taking, affected crime visibility, and enabled figures like social engineer George C. Parker to be caught. He presents the telephone as another supposedly world-changing invention, noting that early operators acted like identity providers and could be socially engineered by convincing voices. Switching systems were introduced to remove human error, but hackers adapted through tone-based attacks such as Captain Crunch’s 2,600 hertz whistle and blue boxes.

The session continues into early computing and networking as further evidence that security history repeats itself. Edwin describes ENIAC, punch cards, the origin of “patch” as covering holes, the invention of passwords in 1962, and an immediate password dump when someone printed the password file. He connects ARPANET, Creeper, Reaper, WarGames, and the 1988 worm to recurring waves of panic, hype, and adaptation. Even with new interfaces, networks, computers, passwords, and automation, the pattern stays consistent: trust assumptions are created, attackers find ways around them, and society rebrands old security problems as new crises.