Lengthy profile on famed jailbreaker Geohot from The New Yorker
“I hack because I’m bored.”
The New Yorker published a very lengthy piece this morning that profiles the famed jailbreak George Hotz—a.k.a Geohot. This 22-year-old has seen a ton of publicity over the years for being the first to unlock the iPhone, getting sued by Sony, and working at Facebook for eight months.
The piece by David Kushner delves into many of Hotz’s projects, which have benefited the jailbreaking community in many ways. Kushner looked at Hotz’s first accomplishment of unlocking the first-gen iPhone to work on T-Mobile. He described the process:
He used a Phillips-head eyeglass screwdriver to undo the two screws in the back of the phone. Then he slid a guitar pick around the tiny groove, and twisted free the shell with a snap. Eventually, he found his target: a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work. To get the baseband to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from another part of the phone. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some voltage on it, and scrambled its code. The iPhone was now at his command. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work on any wireless carrier.
The piece takes a closer look at Hotz’s work on the PS3, being sued by Sony, and his short stint at Facebook. You can read the full story over at The New Yorker.