Less than two months after a settlement was reached in Sony's case against hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz, Facebook gave him a job.
The 21-year old first became well known for his work on unlocking the iPhone. More recently, he was sued by Sony for his involvement with uncovering the PlayStation 3's root key and publishing it online. He was initially unworried by the lawsuit, but as things dragged on, Sony was accused by many of using underhanded tactics such as attempting to have the case tried in California instead of his home state of New Jersey to balloon his legal fees. The case would go on to be settled in April. "It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier," Hotz said at the time. "I'm happy to have the litigation behind me."

That wouldn't be end of the matter for Sony. In response to what was deemed to be an abuse of the judicial system, hacker group Anonymous launched an attack on the Sony. The PlayStation website went down briefly and then, later in the month, the PlayStation Network breach took place which compromised millions of users' personal information and caused the service to be taken down for several weeks. Anonymous was never proven to be responsible and it's unknown if the Hotz lawsuit was what prompted hackers to go after PSN. Other companies took notice of what happened, including Microsoft -- the company said late last month it would work with a young hacker who carried out phishing attempts on Xbox Live in order to "develop his talent for legitimate purposes."

Following the PSN attack, Hotz publicly spoke out on the situation, saying that people should blame not Sony's engineers, but its executives. "The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea," he said. A new lawsuit last week claimed that Sony fired employees just before the breach that were "responsible for maintaining the security of the network."

As for Hotz's new Facebook job, which he started in May and announced earlier this month, it sounds as if he'll be working on Facebook's upcoming iPad app.

http://www.1up.com/news/sony-hacker-geohot-hired-facebook

Posted: Jun 27, 2011 6:16 pm