George Francis Hotz, alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur, and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework.
Hotz in 2016
George Hotz speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016
iOS jailbreaking is the use of a privilege escalation exploit to remove software restrictions imposed by Apple on devices running iOS and iOS-based operating systems. It is typically done through a series of kernel patches. A jailbroken device typically permits root access within the operating system and provides the right to install software unavailable through the App Store. Different devices and versions are exploited with a variety of tools. Apple views jailbreaking as a violation of the end-user license agreement and strongly cautions device owners not to try to achieve root access through the exploitation of vulnerabilities.
Cydia, a popular package manager installed on jailbroken devices
Several people (including saurik, p0sixninja, and geohot) who have contributed to building jailbreaking tools such as AppSnapp, greenpois0n, Absinthe, purplera1n, blackra1n, limera1n, and others. August 2011 at DEF CON.
