By David Kushner
In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone,
in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a
seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile
subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using
his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.
Every hack
poses the same basic challenge: how to make something function in a way
for which it wasn’t designed. In one respect, hacking is an act of
hypnosis. As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak
to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes. 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.”
He used a
Phillips-head eyeglass screwdriver to undo the two screws in the back of
the phone. Then he slid a guitar pick around the tiny groove, and
twisted free the shell with a snap. 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. To get the baseband
to listen to him, he had to override the commands it was getting from
another part of the phone. He soldered a wire to the chip, held some
voltage on it, and scrambled its code. The iPhone was now at his
command. On his PC, he wrote a program that enabled the iPhone to work
on any wireless carrier.
The next morning, Hotz stood in his
parents’ kitchen and hit “Record” on a video camera set up to face him.
He had unruly curls and wispy chin stubble, and spoke with a Jersey
accent. “Hi, everyone, I’m geohot,” he said, referring to his online
handle, then whisked an iPhone from his pocket. “This is the world’s
first unlocked iPhone.”
Hotz’s YouTube video received nearly two
million views and made him the most famous hacker in the world. The
media loved the story of the teen-age Jersey geek who beat Apple. Hotz
announced that he was auctioning off the unlocked phone. The winning
bid, from the C.E.O. of Certicell, a cell-phone-refurbishing company,
was a 2007 Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iPhones. Later, on CNBC,
Erin Burnett asked Hotz if he thought that day’s uptick in Apple stock
was due in part to his efforts. “More people want iPhones now if they
can use them with any sort of provider,” he said, and added that he
“would love to have a talk right now with Steve Jobs” about it.
“Man to man?” Burnett said.
“Man to man.”
Apple
and A.T. & T. remained conspicuously silent. Unlocking a phone was
legal, but it could enable piracy. Many hardware manufacturers sell the
devices at a loss, recovering the costs through monthly contracts or
software sales. 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.
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, who hacked telephone systems
early in his career, sent Hotz a congratulatory e-mail. “It was like a
story out of a movie of someone who solves an incredible mystery,”
Wozniak told me. “I understand the mind-set of a person who wants to do
that, and I don’t think of people like that as criminals. In fact, I
think that misbehavior is very strongly correlated with and responsible
for creative thought.”
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. He wanted to conquer the purportedly impenetrable PlayStation 3
gaming console, the latest version of Sony’s flagship system. “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. “It’s time for that to
change.”
“My whole life is a hack,” Hotz told
me one afternoon last June, in Palo Alto, California. He had moved there
the previous month. He was now twenty-one, stocky, and scruffy. He wore
a gray T-shirt under a gray hoodie, ripped bluejeans, and brown suède
moccasins. “I don’t hack because of some ideology,” he said. “I hack
because I’m bored.”
The word “hacker,” when it was applied to
technology, initially meant college students and hobbyists, exploring
machines. At worst, a hacker was a prankster. In the early
nineteen-seventies, Wozniak, the hacker archetype, built a system that
let him make free phone calls. Among others, he called the Vatican,
pretending to be Henry Kissinger, and managed to get a bishop on the
line. Over time, “hacker” acquired a more sinister meaning: someone who
steals your credit cards, or crashes the electronic grid. Today, there
are two main types of hackers, and only one is causing this kind of
trouble. A “white hat” hacker—an anti-virus programmer, for instance, or
someone employed in military cyberdefense—aims to make computers work
better. It is the “black hat” hacker who sets out to attack, causing
havoc or ripping people off. 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. 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.
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