While Huang's efforts are commendable he didn't really do anything new which may save him from from the wrath of the DMCA of Microsoft and our US Govt attempting to put him in Jail the rest of his life and millions in fines. He simply used a process that was very common in the early days of Personal Computers where we had to adapt the few hard drives that were available to work with the many systems that were out there before the IBM PC became the standard. I had to use a similar board to get a Winchester 10 Meg hard drive connected to my TRS-80 Computer way back then.
The really big news of the story is the implentation of the CPU Serial number to track individuals surfing the web. That was shot down when Intel attempted it but was going to happen quietly by Microsoft until their hand was tipped by the MIT graduate.