George Hotz, the programmer who was recently sued by Sony for releasing instructions on how to hack the PlayStation 3, has joined Facebook, according to his status update on the social networking site. It appears that he started in May.
It’s not clear what Hotz will be doing at Facebook, although ZDNet speculated that he may be involved in Project Spartan, Facebook’s rumored HTML5 platform that will take on Apple’s App Store.
“George Hotz is Facebook is really an amazing place to work…first hackathon over,” reads his status update on June 22.
It’s not so unusual to see a well-known hacker wind up at Facebook, a company that encourages its engineers to tinker and experiment with products.
Hotz’s PlayStation 3 hack allowed the console owners to run unauthorized applications, such as older PlayStation games as well as pirated games. While Sony couldn’t do anything about the fact that he’d modified his gaming console, the company sued him for distributing the instructions. The lawsuit was settled in April, after Hotz promised to not tinker with any more Sony products.
Hotz, or his more commonly known handle, GeoHot, created a program that modified the iPhone to run on other carrier networks back in 2008, despite AT&T having an exclusive deal with Apple.