Rumours have surfaced that Facebook has hired George Hotz to develop its long-awaited iPad app. Sony’s pursuit for the hacking of the PS3 was the trigger that saw hackers breach Sony’s websites.
Twenty-one-year-old George Hotz (‘GeoHot’) is understood to have gone on the run after Sony decided to come down hard on him for writing and sharing the software code that circumvented the security code on the PlayStation 3 to make it capable of running unauthorised software and games.
Before that, software genius Hotz was the first to develop the software to jailbreak the iPhone.
Highly prized capabilities
According to reports, Hotz has accepted a job at Facebook to work on the top-secret and long-awaited iPad app.
It makes sense, in a way. Facebook was set up by Mark Zuckerberg, a consummate coder and hacker himself, who hacked into Harvard’s servers to create the first iteration of Facebook.
Hotz’s coding abilities would be highly prized at the social networking giant, which is now understood to have reached 750m users.
In April, Sony succumbed to one of the most devastating hacker attacks in history, with more than 100m users’ details breached. The attack on the Sony network by hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous is believed to have been in reprisal for Sony’s relentless pursuit of Hotz.
