George Hotz: The Hacker Who Unlocked Freedom and Shaped Modern Cybersecurity
At seventeen, George Hotz (known online as “geohot”) unlocked Apple’s first iPhone. He bypassed AT&T’s carrier restrictions and sparked a revolution in digital rights. This wasn’t just a technical feat. He proved that users should control the devices they own. This philosophy would define his entire career.
The iPhone Unlock That Changed Everything
In summer 2007, Apple unveiled the iPhone in an exclusive partnership with AT&T. Hotz was a T-Mobile subscriber who wanted to use the device with his existing carrier. Working alone from his parents’ home in New Jersey, he reverse-engineered the phone.
He removed two screws, used a guitar pick to pop open the back, and identified his target: the baseband processor chip that enforced carrier restrictions. Using a soldering iron, he carefully soldered a wire onto the chip, applied voltage, and scrambled the programming. He then developed custom software that allowed the iPhone to operate on any network.
His YouTube video demonstrating the world’s first unlocked iPhone got nearly two million views within days. Media outlets worldwide celebrated the teenage tech whiz who had outsmarted Apple. Hotz traded his second unlocked iPhone to the CEO of Certicell for a Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iPhones.
Apple and AT&T stayed silent, though Steve Jobs later acknowledged the ongoing “cat-and-mouse game” between hackers and companies. Hotz never received direct communication from Jobs, but his message was clear: user freedom beats corporate control.
Cracking the “Unhackable” PlayStation 3
In December 2009, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 with a challenge: become the first person to crack Sony’s supposedly impenetrable gaming console. Sony had long touted the PS3’s security as unbreakable. Hotz accepted.
By January 22, 2010, just over a month later, he announced he had gained read and write access to the system’s memory and hypervisor-level CPU access. He used a $350 soldering iron to apply voltage pulses to scramble the Cell chips. Then he spent weeks coding a five-hundred-line program to take control of the machine.
On January 23, 2010, Hotz proclaimed on his blog: “I have hacked the PS3”. He freely distributed the code and instructions, enabling others to run homebrew applications on their consoles. He designed his jailbreak to prevent piracy and included a disclaimer stating “I do not support piracy”.
The Sony Lawsuit and the Fight for User Rights
Sony filed for a temporary restraining order against Hotz on January 11, 2011. They cited violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and alleged his jailbreak enabled piracy. Sony demanded that Hotz surrender his computers, remove all PlayStation information from his website, and never hack Sony products again.
The lawsuit became a flashpoint in the debate over digital rights. Sony subpoenaed PayPal for Hotz’s account transactions and demanded that YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms hand over IP addresses of everyone who viewed his content. The aggressive tactics sparked widespread backlash within the hacker community.
Hotz fought back publicly, releasing a rap song dissing Sony and arguing that the same precedent allowing iPhone jailbreaking should apply to other devices. “If you jailbreak one closed system, why not another?” he asked during a television interview.
In April 2011, the parties settled out of court on the condition that Hotz would never again hack Sony products. The case highlighted critical questions about ownership, user rights, and the boundaries of the DMCA that still resonate today.
From Hacker to Security Innovator
After Hotz won Google’s Pwnium hacking competition in March 2014 by breaching Chrome OS security, Google awarded him $150,000. They invited him to join Project Zero, an elite team of security researchers dedicated to finding and eliminating zero-day vulnerabilities. During his internship, Hotz developed QIRA (pronounced “keeruh”), an open-source “timeless debugging” tool that revolutionized exploit development.
QIRA records the entire execution history of a program as a “timeless trace”. This allows researchers to navigate backward and forward through program execution without re-running the code. Hotz demonstrated QIRA’s power at the 2016 USENIX Enigma Conference, showing how he provided a 10x speedup in exploit development cycles.
The tool proved its worth in real-world competition. Hotz won the 2014 SECUINSIDE CTF (Capture the Flag) competition by himself, taking home a $30,000 prize. QIRA continues to benefit security researchers and ethical hackers worldwide.
Comma.ai and Accessible Autonomous Driving
In 2015, Hotz founded Comma.ai to make self-driving technology accessible to everyone. His vision was to create the “Android of autonomous driving,” an open-source alternative to Tesla’s proprietary Autopilot system. The result was OpenPilot, an aftermarket driver-assistance system that works with over 200 vehicle models.
His philosophy stayed consistent: empower individuals to use technology however they want. “Unlocking the iPhone let people use whatever carrier they wanted, and jailbreaking the PS3 let people run any software they wanted,” he explained.
The Comma 3, released in 2022, features dual forward-facing cameras spaced like human eyes. The device runs entirely on open-source software that users modify freely. This fosters a community of developers who continuously improve the system’s capabilities. As of 2023, approximately 5,000 units are in use.
Tinygrad and the Tiny Corp
In 2022, Hotz founded the tiny corp with an ambitious mission: “We will commoditize the petaflop”. At the heart of this effort is tinygrad, an open-source deep learning framework designed to be radically simpler than competitors like PyTorch while staying fully featured.
The tiny corp’s flagship product, the tinybox, is a $15,000 “personal compute cluster” designed for local AI model training and inference. With 738 FP16 TFLOPS of computing power and 144 GB of GPU RAM, the tinybox aims to make AI accessible beyond cloud providers and tech giants. Hotz raised $5.1 million in funding for the project in 2023. All software is MIT licensed open source.
Tinygrad has already run Stable Diffusion in under 700 lines of code, demonstrating the framework’s simplicity and power. By challenging NVIDIA’s dominance and building in partnership with AMD, Hotz continues his mission of breaking down barriers erected by proprietary systems.
The Lasting Legacy
George Hotz’s contributions extend far beyond individual hacks. He inspired an entire generation of hackers and security researchers to question artificial limitations imposed by corporations. His work demonstrated that security through obscurity fails against determined, skilled individuals, pushing companies to adopt more robust security practices.
More importantly, Hotz championed the principle that people should control the technology they purchase. Whether unlocking iPhones, jailbreaking game consoles, developing open-source debugging tools, or creating accessible autonomous driving systems, his career reflects a consistent philosophy: technology should empower users, not restrict them.
Key lessons from his career:
Technical skill matters. Hotz combined hardware manipulation with software development to achieve breakthroughs others thought impossible.
Open-source contributions benefit everyone. Tools like QIRA and tinygrad continue helping researchers and developers worldwide.
User rights matter. Advocating for digital ownership and user autonomy advances the entire field.
Resilience through adversity. Despite lawsuits and setbacks, Hotz continued contributing to technology and security.
George Hotz’s legacy proves that hackers are heroes who challenge the status quo, expose vulnerabilities, and make technology better and more accessible for everyone.
