It has been quite some time since George Hotz has been in the public limelight, generally appearing to keep himself to himself over the last few months after he reportedly left his employment with social media giants Facebook. Living in the wilderness and out of the public eye is a lifestyle which doesn’t really seem to suit the legendary hacker, considering we have seen him at his best and most entertaining when he was releasing his rap record retort to Sony Computer Entertainment of America or pipping the Chronic Dev-Team to the post a day before they were set to launch their Greenpois0n jailbreak for iOS.
It would appear that Hotz, more commonly known by his online moniker of Geohot, has been a naughty little hacker, having gotten himself arrested by the Sierra Blanca border patrols for marijuana possession. Detectives from the Texas based Sierra Blanca police department booked and charged Geohot with felony marijuana possession after taking him to the local station, meaning he joins a rater illustrious list of individuals who have suffered the same fate at the patrol areas of Sierra Blanca.
For those who may not be familiar with the life and antics of George Hotz, he is the computer hacker who managed to produce the first jailbreak for the original iPhone by physically taking the device apart and making certain hardware changes to the internals. The jailbreak scene has obviously come a long way since then with jailbreaks being achieved through the use of various hardware and software based vulnerabilities. Geohot has also had a very public run in with the legal might of Sony Computer Entertainment of America when they started litigation against him for producing and releasing tutorials and software online allowing PlayStation 3 owners to jailbreak their device. With the Sony suit behind him, it seemed that taking up a development opportunity at Facebook would keep him out of the public eye.
So just what was Geohot doing around the Texas area when he was busted? Well, he was scheduled to give a talk at the SXSW conference in Austin when officers allowed their on site sniffer dogs to check each vehicle passing through the checkpoint. If the dog goes crazy, the car gets searched and that is exactly what appears to have happened in this case according to Above The Law. In normal circumstances, the offender would be booked at the local Sheriffs office and handed a citation, which doesn’t seem like to raw of a deal.
After being taken down-town and booked, Hotz was released on a $1,500 bond and free to go about his business. We haven’t heard any reports on whether or not he had to use any of his jailbreak skills during his ordeal.
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