Geohot Joins Facebook As Product Developer 108
Numerous sources are reporting that famed iPhone and PlayStation hacker George Hotz, better known as Geohot, has taken a job at Facebook in product development; Make Magazine and others report that he'll be working on iOS apps.
Re:Facebook? Has he sold out or what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Doing what you love, vs. doing what you love and getting paid for it.
Gee. What a hard choice to make.
Re:Facebook? Has he sold out or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I'd imagine he has quite a bit of lawyer bills to pay right now so a good paying job is probably a good idea for him. I don't see how you would think it equates to working for Sony. Facebook didn't take him to court.
They're saying that he is going to be working on the iOS app, so at least he is doing something he knows. After thinking about it, I'm surprised something like this didn't happen sooner. He knows iOS pretty well, it only makes sense that he would get a job somewhere making apps for it, and Facebook is one of the bigger companies with a more hacker friendly attitude.
Ah, missed opportunities.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What Sony should've done if they had a working brain left anywhere outside their legal department. What does that say about an innovating company when its best minds are on the floor marked Legal?
Re:Facebook? Has he sold out or what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you don't like company A, and you don't like company B, doesn't mean that someone else working for B is like him working for A from his perspective.
My understanding is that the distaste for Sony came from it trying to lock out developers and hackers who wanted to put their own stuff into the PS3 ecosystem. Facebook lets developers in*, the developers are just not allowed to take users out.
* Seriously; it seems every third week,at some point navigating to facebook.com lands me on some kind of phishing page or scam poll. It'd be a lot easier for FB to avoid that kind of vulnerability if they were far more draconian about developer access.
"...he'll be working on iOS apps." (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Resume stain (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Facebook? Has he sold out or what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hacking iOS and hacking the PS3 is quite different from developing end-user apps for it.
They both require coding skills, and knowledge about software - yet when creating an app you're supposed to follow the guidelines, add a nice looking UI to it, etc. I see coding as a tool, no more. A tool to get something done. Building an app with nice UI means you need some UI skills. Building an app that hacks the underlying OS means you have crypto and system analyses skills.
I'm writing an app for Android myself, but I don't know much about the technicalities of Android under the hood, nor do I see much of a need for anyone to deeply understand the OS. Google has nicely abstracted that for me through their API kit. No need to know how memory is allocated exactly, or how and when an app is closed automatically (other than knowing it may happen).
I'd more expect this guy to end up in the computer security field.
But as you say, the pay is probably good. Very good. It has to be for someone with such skills.
Re:Facebook? Has he sold out or what? (Score:5, Insightful)