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It's somewhat frustrating that he continues to get the credit for "hacking the iphone" when he was neither the first nor the only person on the project. The "iPhone Dev Team" was a group of five to ten people who built tools to jailbreak the phone and unlock the radio. If anything, the first person was a guy called Nightwatch who was also associated with various .tif exploits to unlock the PSP. As near as I could tell at the time he worked in some capacity for a South American university. Geohot worked only on the baseband unlock and was forced out of the closed discussions when he released exploits before everyone had time to prepare. This is important because some peoples participation in the project could have potentially affected their employment. Luckily I don't know that anything bad happened, but suffice it to say the kid is not a team player.



Take some time to watch his YouTube video explaining the iPhone hack.

He starts the video by giving credit to other people involved in the project.


Nice. Can you link me? I was involved in the project :)


what was your osx86 handle? I was also involved in the early times but don't recognize your name.


It was ixtli. I wrote iPHUC and still own the repo, i think: https://code.google.com/p/iphuc/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS


ah the very early days then, nice. yeah I understand your take, George did get credited for things that were a team effort (including a lot of work by gray). but really a lot of that was the press who just based it off him being the one to publish the unlock demo video, he just probably got tired of correcting people.

as a counterpoint in which he was definitely a team player and not many knew about, he helped us get iOS 3 for S5L8900 devices pwned when we couldn't get the firmware files decrypted due to tricks that Apple put in iBoot (for only that version too - taken out after), which involved using a built in coprocessor and a payload in an assembly language that wasn't ARM and none of us could recognize. so to try to work it out he actually reverse engineered the structure of the assembly language to help figure out what it was doing, which was really cool. I don't think the whole payload got fully "reversed" as I believe one of us (it was either ius or myself) found a data sheet that pointed to it being some type of 16-bit RISC based thing, but was still pretty cool to see how he went about solving the problem. there was nothing directly incentivizing him to help other than a fun challenge.




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