GR Tech Wiz Working at Facebook

The tech community has been abuzz in recent days with news that notorious hacker George Hotz, who grew up here in Glen Rock, has taken a job at one of the country's top tech companies.

It was first reported by TechUnwrapped last weekend — there had been chatter amongst multiple sources in the hacking world via twitter and a recent chat video posted on YouTube between members of a tech group — that the 21-year-old hacker had taken a job with Facebook based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Facebook confirmed, via the tech site ReadWriteWeb, that Hotz began working for them last month, but stopped short of specifying his role with the company.

Hotz first came to the public's attention in 2007 when he released a "jail break" for one of the original versions of the Apple iPhone.

The first three iterations of Apple's wildly successful smartphone had been programmed to operate exclusively on the AT&T network — Hotz's jail break of the device's software enabled users to go out of network.

Hotz, who often goes by the online handle "GeoHot," re-entered popular media again around April 2010 when he began releasing info regarding a new hack exploiting the operating system of Sony's popular video game console PS3.

In January of 2011 Sony filed suit against Hotz — the case was later settled out of court. The basic details of the settlement have been well publicized in the media and even blogged about by GeoHot on his public blog, which has been mostly quiet since the settlement.

Hotz attended the Glen Rock Public Schools and Bergen Academies in Hackensack.