George Hotz aka GeoHot, the famous iPhone and Sony PlayStation hacker, is back. After hacking into Sony’s Playstation 3, GeorHot was hired by Facebook last June. That gig didn’t last long. He no longer works there. So what is he doing in his free time? Hacking.
FSM EXCLUSIVE DEAL When Hotz waltzed in the door at Backplane – a startup funded by Lady Gaga, he introduced himself as the hacker who was sued by Sony, but he’s most famous for releasing software that allows smartphone users to jailbreak their iPhone.
During the hackathon, GeoHot built an app that allows you to see where your Facebook friends are on a map. Aviv Ovadya, a Quora engineer, was also on the team. Ovadya focused on the front end mapping part of the program. Hotz was focused on getting the API info and programming that into location data.
Hotz worked on making the map prettier, by making the actual photos of his Facebook profile friends appear. Another hacker suggested that Hotz filter the results by gender. So Hotz coded it to sort by female or male. The app didn’t win — it lost out to a group of high school students.
GeoHot’s last contribution to the iPhone community was a bootrom exploit called limera1n for the iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, iPad, iPhone 4, and iPod Touch 4G.
[thx Andy via, via]
