With this article of about 2500 words, you will learn the story of George Holtz the Fantastic Boy in 7 minutes
Most people may be busy building blocks by the time they're 5 years old, or doing addition and subtraction within twenty with their fingers. But george hods wrote his first computer program at the age of 5 — in the 1980s, there were no children's programming classes.
Talent begins to shine. In fifth grade, he built his own console using Radio Shack's electronic component kit. At the age of 14, Holtz was a finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering Awards with a homemade mapping robot.
By high school, Holtz had taken control of all the school computers on one afternoon, allowing them to play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the same time. The music is sometimes magnificent and sometimes cheerful. In the surging D major, there is a faint call for the school leaders to be angry
jailbreak
In 2007, the first generation of Apple mobile phones came out. People were pleasantly surprised, but also slightly dissatisfied - Jobs signed a contract with AT&T, the largest operator in the United States at the time, and the iPhone could only use AT&T as an operator.
Unfortunately, Holtz is a subscriber to another carrier, T-Mobile.
Change operator? It was the kind of decision That Hods would never make in his lifetime. He got his phone, found a screwdriver and his own guitar paddle, and pried open the iP hon e.
The most critical problem in "jailbreaking" iP hon e for full Netcom is how to get the machine to run the functions that it could have run, but would not have run. Holtz pondered.
By chance, Holtz saw the "Master of Hypnosis" leaflet in the newspaper, and the inspiration poured out: Can he "hypnotize" the hardware and make him accept his instructions and execute them?
The road ahead is suddenly clear. Holtz found a small piece of black plastic in the iP hon e where the portal was open. It's called a baseband processor, and it's the culprit that limits the iP hon e networking capabilities.
Soon, the baseband processor was penalized. It is welded into a wire by Hodz, with a voltage attached, and the code is messy. Subsequently, Holtz wrote a program for the cracker so that it could be used under any network.
After 500 hours of getting the iP Hon e, Holtz recorded it all with a video camera in his kitchen. The constant shaking and inconsistency of the lens did not distract the video at all, and when Holtz showed people the "T-mobile" and jailbreak program at the top of the screen, it was no longer worth mentioning.
In the end, this "total loss" video received more than 2.3 million views and has been called "one of the most classic videos in digital history".
Subsequently, he auctioned off the "world's first cracked iP hon e" and exchanged it for a Nissan 350Z sports car and three new iP hon e.
Jobs looked helpless, describing it as a "game of cat and mouse." For The request of Hotz to meet and talk, Jobs laughed.
But Woz, who is also Apple's founder, praised his actions. It's like something a pure hacker would do. Woz remembered that he had made a telephone hacking system when he was young, posing as secretary of state to call the Vatican, and almost became a bishop.
Hack PS3
A Reporter from the New Yorker visited Hodsse's house to interview him. Holtz casually wore a tank top and shorts, and the room was littered with drinking Red Bull cans and takeaway boxes. Strikingly, three huge computer screens and a whiteboard scrawled with a large number of formulas were scribbled.
Holtz believes he is a natural hacker.
"I'm not a hacker because of an idea, it's because I'm bored... This is very exciting, cracking is to compete with the system. I'm wrestling with the original hardware author. When the hack went into a computer system, I felt like I was bloody. ”
After successfully cracking the iP hon e, Hodz rose to fame. Countless people sent him all kinds of electronic components for him to crack. Among them, someone sent him a PS3 and told him that no one could crack it yet.
It's a great way to get a hacker motivated. Faced with a system that stood for three years without anyone to understand, Hodz decided to accept the challenge.
But the challenge is much more difficult than imagined. He experienced countless failures, solved countless technical problems, and finally, with a set of 500 lines of code, Hodz successfully cracked the PS3.
With bloodshot eyes, he named the program "Finnegan Vigil," the name of a novel in which people thought the protagonist was dead, but the protagonist ended up alive.
As a game fan, Holtz did not use his cracks to download pirated games. Arguably, he didn't even make a profit from it all — he posted the results online for free.
But Sony is clearly not as generous as Apple. In a fit of rage, they took Hodse to court.
However, Sony clearly miscalculated the direction of the public opinion. It is believed that Sony interfered with people's right to dispose of personal belongings. Some hacking groups, in solidarity with Hodz, once hacked Sony's website.
Holtz wasn't much happy about it. He said things shouldn't be that way. Under pressure from all sides, Sony reconciled with Hodse and said it would no longer crack Sony's technical support system.
At the same time, he denounced hackers who stole user information for profit.
"Creating and exploring is wonderful, but even with a villain like Sony, theft is the most shameful act. You're smearing hackers. ”
With this experience, he became more mature than before. He realized that his ability was not only to hack iPhones and PS3s, he could make the world a better place.
So, he turned to the field of artificial intelligence and began to study autonomous driving technology. He hopes to become an Uber, accumulate more data for his self-driving system, and eventually build a world-class autonomous driving system
When it comes to purpose, his answer is surprising and reasonable.
"I don't care about money, I want to have power, not power over others, but power above the destiny of nature and technology." I just want to know how things work. ”
The story of the hackers continues, and the context of the story becomes clearer: there is nothing these hackers can't do. And, these are the people who can change the world with technology.
Under Hodz's blog, some people jokingly call him "Magical Fruit Ability", while others call him "Magic Boy", like the code name of a superhero.
Perhaps, we need those extraordinary people to lead us forward. When we push open the door, there are rivers and mountains that have not been seen