14 DAY TRIAL // Many iPhone owners have heard of George Hotz, or Geohot, as he is best known on the web. If you ask anyone even remotely interested in iPhone hacks, they’ll tell you he’s the guy who hacked Apple’s original iPhone to unlock it for use on multiple carriers.
The feat was impressive at the time Geohot grabbed a Phillips-head eyeglass screwdriver and performed the task on his own iPhone. It still is today, but he's given up iOS hacking for a while.
Profiling Hotz for The New Yorker, David Kushner writes:
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.
But nothing beats a congratulatory email from none other than Apple co-founder and America’s favorite geek, Steve Wozniak. Kushner explains:
“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’.”