![]() The number of black-hat intrusions is rising: in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security has reported a spike-fifty thousand between October and March, up ten thousand from the same period last year. A recent series of attacks on Brazil’s largest banks, which took down their Web sites for a short time, is an example of the malicious black-hat type. It is the “black hat” hacker who sets out to attack, causing havoc or ripping people off. A “white hat” hacker-an anti-virus programmer, for instance, or someone employed in military cyberdefense-aims to make computers work better. Today, there are two main types of hackers, and only one is causing this kind of trouble. Over time, “hacker” acquired a more sinister meaning: someone who steals your credit cards, or crashes the electronic grid. Among others, he called the Vatican, pretending to be Henry Kissinger, and managed to get a bishop on the line. In the early nineteen-seventies, Wozniak, the hacker archetype, built a system that let him make free phone calls. The word “hacker,” when it was applied to technology, initially meant college students and hobbyists, exploring machines. ![]() “I don’t hack because of some ideology,” he said. He wore a gray T-shirt under a gray hoodie, ripped bluejeans, and brown suède moccasins. He was now twenty-one, stocky, and scruffy. “My whole life is a hack,” Hotz told me one afternoon last June, in Palo Alto, California. “The PS3 has been on the market for over three years now, and it is yet to be hacked,” he blogged on December 26, 2009. He wanted to conquer the purportedly impenetrable PlayStation 3 gaming console, the latest version of Sony’s flagship system. Hotz continued to “jailbreak,” or unlock, subsequent versions of the iPhone until, two years later, he turned to his next target: one of the world’s biggest entertainment companies, Sony. In fact, I think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.” “I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. ![]() “It was like a story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery,” Wozniak told me. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. When Steve Jobs was asked at a press conference about the unlocked iPhone, he smiled awkwardly and said, “This is a constant cat-and-mouse game that we play. . . . People will try to break in, and it’s our job to keep them from breaking in.” Hotz never heard directly from Jobs. Many hardware manufacturers sell the devices at a loss, recovering the costs through monthly contracts or software sales. Unlocking a phone was legal, but it could enable piracy. “This is the world’s first unlocked iPhone.”Īpple and A.T. “Hi, everyone, I’m geohot,” he said, referring to his online handle, then whisked an iPhone from his pocket. He had unruly curls and wispy chin stubble, and spoke with a Jersey accent. The next morning, Hotz stood in his parents’ kitchen and hit “Record” on a video camera set up to face him. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work on any wireless carrier. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some voltage on it, and scrambled its code. To get the baseband to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from another part of the phone. Eventually, he found his target: a square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work. ![]() Then he slid a guitar pick around the tiny groove, and twisted free the shell with a snap. He used a Phillips-head eyeglass screwdriver to undo the two screws in the back of the phone. After weeks of research with other hackers online, Hotz realized that, if he could make a chip inside the phone think it had been erased, it was “like talking to a baby, and it’s really easy to persuade a baby.” As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes. In one respect, hacking is an act of hypnosis. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.Įvery hack poses the same basic challenge: how to make something function in a way for which it wasn’t designed. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. Radical hackers took up Hotz’s fight, although he never considered himself a cause.
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