George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), alias geohot, million75 or simply mil, is known for publicizing the collaboration leading to a procedure for unlocking the Apple iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers, contrary to AT&T and Apple's intent.
On August 21, 2007, Hotz announced on his blog that he had successfully executed and demonstrated the first Hardware unlock of the iPhone using a technique that was developed by a team of five hackers, Hotz being one of this team. The unlock allowed the iPhone to be used with any SIM card. He later posted the team's 10-step method on his blog. Although other purported unlocks appeared earlier, Hotz claims theirs was the first to allow full functionality of the iPhone with almost any GSM wireless carrier without any external hardware, although the process requires experience with soldering and software.
Hotz, who had bought his first iPhone on its launch date, was originally associated with the iPhone Dev unlocking team, but was later banned from the team. He estimates that he spent more than 500 hours working on the unlock. He said his primary aim was to enable other users to easily unlock their own iPhones.
According to his blog, Hotz traded his unlocked 4GB iPhone to Terry Daidone, the founder of Certicell, for a Nissan 350Z car and three 8GB iPhones. Hotz said he wanted to give the iPhones to the other members of the team who created the hack with him.[citation needed] Hotz's hardware based unlocking technique has largely been replaced by software unlocking that does not require disassembly of the iPhone.
George Hotz recently developed the first software unlock for the iPhone's new Bootloader Version 4.6 that was previously only achievable with a "testpoint based hardware unlock"
George gave the iPhone Dev Team an exploit he found in the at+stkprof command that they used as an injection vector for their yellowsn0w payload, which resulted in the first software iPhone 3G unlock. In the sourcecode for YellowSn0w, the 3G unlock daemon, it reads "thanks geohot for at+stkprof 02.28 injection vector".
On July 3, 2009, Hotz announced purplera1n, the first public software exploit for jailbreaking the iPhone 3GS. Details were posted on his blog.
Other Recognition:
Hotz was a finalist at the 2005 ISEF competition, with his project "The Googler". Continuing with robots, Hotz competed in his school's highly successful Titanium Knights battlebots team.
Hotz competed in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a science competition for high school students, where his project, entitled "I want a Holodeck," received awards and prizes in several categories. Hotz has received considerable attention in mainstream media, including interviews on the Today Show, Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, G4, ABC, CNBC, and articles in several magazines, newspapers, and websites, including Forbes[18], BBC and CNN. The Forbes article said Hotz hopes to go into neuroscience: "hacking the brain," he called it. In March 2008, PC World magazine listed George as one of the top 10 Overachievers under 21.
In December 2007, Hotz travelled to Sweden to attend the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar and talk about his 3-D imaging invention (called Project Holodeck) that netted him a $20,000 Intel prize earlier that year.
Sources:wikipediablog
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