Facebook confirmed yesterday they have added George “GeoHot” Hotz to the payroll but haven’t commented as to what he will be doing for them. For those of you who don’t know “GeoHot” he is the infamous iPhone hacker/jailbreaker/unlocker and has also been sued by Sony over “allegedly” hacking the Sony PS3 to install custom applications and play burned games. In 2009 at the age of 19 he released Blackra1n and Blacksn0w. Blackra1n jailbroke all Apple devices from the iPhone 2G, iPod all the way to the iPhone 3GS and Blacksnow provided a lifetime unlock to iPhone 2G owners. Not bad for a guy 3 weeks after his 20th birthday.
How did this come about?
The whole debate over whether or not he was employed by Facebook came from a YouTube video (see below) featuring Joshua Hill, a member of the Chronic-Dev Team also known as P0sixninja. Hill challenged Hotz to find a bootrom exploit for the iPad 2 (which would allow the Dev Team to jailbreak the iPad 2) and this news quickly spread on the Twitter network. In the video Hill said that Hotz was mad at him because he doesn’t want that much attention and backed out of the challenge to work at his day job… at Facebook. However, for people who know Hotz work, he is probably working on it behind the scene as he’s not one to back down from a challenge.
