As someone who has seen both of them work (and who got sued on the same lawsuit)... I wish people would stop putting geohot up on a pedestal. His entire career has been about self-promotion (something which he is very good at), but he got his start taking credit for other people's work (that SIM lock stuff was largely just implementing stuff other people told him about). He even took credit from my/our (fail0verflow's) work when he did the thing that got him sued (published some PS3 private keys), which was just him implementing the ECDSA attack we had detailed in a presentation a week prior, without a single mention until I emailed him to ask him to do so.
Alyssa's Panfrost work is leaps and bounds ahead of anything geohot has ever personally done.
Pretty much everyone of our profile gets started at around that age (I was porting Linux to a weirdo ISP router at 14 and working on Wii hardware and homebrew, the first "well known" thing I did, starting at 16-17), but somehow geohot has marketed himself to be some kind of genius when he's one of the more mediocre hackers I've known. He's not bad these days, but he has always represented his skills as being way better than they actually are, and taken solo credit for work that involved other people, his entire career.
Addendum: if you want someone I would consider an outstanding teenage hacker... look at comex.
I've seen that guy work in person and sometimes it felt like he was just streaming keystrokes into the keyboard buffer without regard for any visual feedback. That time at CCC, he was working on exploiting the Wii U. A bit later he called me over, and I was staring at a blank assembly file. He had just completed a full stack Wii U exploit, from WebKit to the kernel to the security CPU to its kernel, and expected me to dictate some assembly to him to dump the eFuses where the keys are held. I stumbled something like "Uuuuh.... I guess we need to deal with banks.... well how much memory can you dump? Uh.... yeah let's just treat it at linear.... errrr.... make a loop? I guess load a register with 0 and loop until, uhh... 0x1000? Yeah and you need to set the top bit and store that into, er.... 0xd8000...dc? I think? Let me check... uhh yeah and then read the data word from e0. I think. And put that somewhere you can dump."
I think part of the fascination with wunderkind programmers, is that it reinforces the idea that people have innate talent, something that can be comforting to those who lack it. It’s similar to the fascination with lottery winners. Most people understand that building wealth tends to happen over decades from reasonable learned habits, but the fantasy of sudden, unearned wealth is more fun. Child geniuses are the fantasy of being good at something without putting in the work.
To put it very simplistic, there will always be the Wozniak's and the Jobs types in any scene/company/etc. (among others of course). The geo"hot"s of the world, with big egos, who like the publicity, make a rap video and promote "the cause" aggressively. That won't ever change but at least they are going into (and also bringing in) more mainstream media and folks. So there's that.
Something along the line of "there's no bad publicity", because out of the millions of tv watchers and his yt rap video watchers, these brings in a lot of people (at least teens) interested in the scene with a higher percentage of those who remain and go deeper into the technical parts of hacks, then learning about fail0verflow & co.
Many only then realized what the big picture actually is (insert podium meme)
So, for what it's worth, never underestimate how many people REALLY know and appreciate a lot more fail0verflow's work. Thanks again!
p.s. hopefully PS4 will catch up to the good old days of PS3. Pepperidge Farm remembers. Also that last year there was a pseudo-consensus that held-back PS4 hacks will be released only after the PS5 appears. (pretty please)
Geohot regularly streams programming on twitch. He's the real deal, you can go check out his streams on YouTube to see what he's doing now. What's especially impressive about him is how he can perform at a high level for hours and hours. Some of those streams are 10 hours long. I can't do that.
But many other people can. I'm not saying geohot is a completely unremarkable fraud, I'm saying he doesn't deserve the level of recognition he gets. There are plenty of people pulling 10-hour programming marathons today.
I just wish he weren't the default "genius teenage hacker" that people keep bringing up in completely unrelated threads. Let that honor go to any of the many humbler folks more skilled than him and who can actually work in teams with others :) (there's a reason why he's never been able been able to hold a job more than briefly as an intern...)
I don’t follow the above stuff close enough to have an opinion on the matter, mostly just hijacking this thread to say I’ve been following you on Twitter for a couple yrs now and have tons of respect for the work you do.
A rare talent that from what I’ve seen. Who also gets respect from people way smarter than myself. That’s always a signal I look for when I’m in out of my scope.
I hope this project works out for you. Always so much BS on the people side in OSS, something I learned the hard-way long ago. But talent is talent, work speaks for itself, etc.
You’ve certainly chosen a general enough topic/niche to draw lots of generic opinions and the whole peanut gallery stuff. So I predict this road will require quite of bit of blinders to operate without the constant distractions from the non contributing opinionated mediocrity. The only way to stay productive in such an environment IMO.
Well, if the allegations here are true, he'll probably do very well getting a revolving door of VCs to give him money even if he/his company doesn't produce anything worthwhile.
Alyssa's Panfrost work is leaps and bounds ahead of anything geohot has ever personally done.
Pretty much everyone of our profile gets started at around that age (I was porting Linux to a weirdo ISP router at 14 and working on Wii hardware and homebrew, the first "well known" thing I did, starting at 16-17), but somehow geohot has marketed himself to be some kind of genius when he's one of the more mediocre hackers I've known. He's not bad these days, but he has always represented his skills as being way better than they actually are, and taken solo credit for work that involved other people, his entire career.