From gray hat to white hat, one of the Internet's more well-known celebrity hackers as of late has decided to take up shop at one of the Web's biggest social properties: Famed PlayStation hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz has gone to Facebook.
It's unclear what exactly Hotz is working on over at Facebook headquarters, but it's rumored that he's involved with product development for the company's alleged iPad app. The news of Hotz's brand-new job first broke when Joshua Hill—a member of the Chronic-Dev Team responsible for a variety of Apple product jailbreaks–noted that Hotz had backed out of an iPad 2 hacking challenge.
The news was confirmed—where else?—from a quick visit to Hotz's Facebook page, where he's listed himself as working as a Facebook software engineer starting in May 2011. His first official day on the job was May 9.
According to Hill, Hotz now prefers to stay out of the public eye when it comes to hacks or exploits. But it's unclear whether Hotz's shift to the corporate world will keep him from investigating new exploits for Apple products or other devices in the future.
Hotz himself has become a sort of rallying cry for the Internet unlocking community due to his successful manipulations of both Apple iPhones and iPod touches as well as Sony's PlayStation 3. The latter exploit, in which he made it possible for users to run homebrew apps and operating systems on their PlayStation 3 systems, was the catalyst for a four-month legal battle between Sony and Hotz.
Sony's very act of suing Hotz (and associates) prompted members of the Internet underground to commence a digital war against Sony. The hacktivist group Anonymous launched a distributed denial of service attack against Sony in April to retaliate for the company going after Hotz. And it was this attack, Sony claims, that distracted the company from noticing the cyber-thieves who ultimately ended up stealing information for a total of 101 million user accounts across Sony's PlayStation Network and the Sony Online Entertainment gaming service.
Sony and Hotz ultimately settled out of court at the end of March: Hotz is forbidden from engaging in "unauthorized access" to a Sony product, including the circumvention of any protection measures on any of Sony's products. Fines for violating the agreement would cost Hotz $10,000 per violation, to a maximum of a quarter-million dollars.
Here's hoping Facebook pays its developers well.
For more from David, follow him on Twitter @TheDavidMurphy.