George “geohot” Hotz just won’t go away, and big tech corporations are very likely annoyed about that. It shows that young hackers can grow up to be slightly older hackers who are still thorns in the sides of the establishment.
The 26-year-old hacker came back into the news this week as he unveiled a self-driving car built with off-the-shelf parts and his own custom software. A Bloomberg writer, Ashlee Vance, confirmed that the car drove itself on the I-280 freeway in the Bay Area. Tesla got a little testy and issued a statement to correct some of the impressions from the interview.
When he was 17, Hotz was the first person to hack the iPhone so that it could be unlocked from AT&T and used with other carriers.
And when he was 20, he hacked the security system of the Sony PlayStation 3 video game console. For his accomplishment, Sony greeted him with a lawsuit. He settled that and clearly went on to do more grown-up things.
We consider the video that Hotz created in response to Sony to be one of his finest moments.