Hotz' Wheels

George Hotz, the 17-year-old hacker who unlocked the iPhone and became an overnight media star, has gotten his wish: a Nissan 350Z.

This fall, Hotz will cruise the sprawling, tree-lined campus of the Rochester Institute of Technology—where he's an incoming freshman—in a "sweet" 350Z he received in trade for "the world's second unlocked iPhone." The first unlocked iPhone is in his pocket.

Hotz said he's receiving the 350Z—the latest in Nissan's line of Z sports cars—from cell phone refurbisher Terry Daidone, the founder of Certicell, according to the young hacker's blog.

Hotz, a New Jersey-bred, award-winning high school hacker, is currently experiencing a worldwide burst of fame—something he says he's not interested in—after documenting what appears to be the first full hardware unlock of Apple's iPhone, allowing the device to be used by major wireless providers beyond AT&T.

"Steve Jobs should hire him," said a hedge-fund analyst who covers technology.

But Hotz has other ideas: "If anyone from Google is watching, I want an internship with you," he reportedly told CNBC. He acknowledged that most people would not go to the trouble of buying a new iPhone and cracking it open, before soldering internal wires.

Hotz's feat comes against the background of a growing debate about so-called "wireless net neutrality"—an argument centered on the Federal Communication Commission's forthcoming 700Mhz wireless spectrum auction.

Google and others have been pushing the F.C.C. to adopt rules that would allow cell phone users to mix and match devices and services. The incumbent cell phone service providers, including AT&T and Verizon, oppose such rules. Hotz has made it patently clear where he stands.

"I really believe that information should be free," Hotz told CNBC, invoking a signature open-source credo.

Unlike his rivals, now rolling out commercial software-based iPhone unlocks under legal threat from AT&T, Hotz says he hacked the iPhone for two reasons: For fun and because he wanted to use an iPhone on T-Mobile. Only later did the whole "get-a-car" thing emerge.

Hotz had initially planned to auction the unlocked iPhone on eBay, but was forced to pull the sale down, he wrote, "due to a total lack of cooperation from eBay." Nice job eBay.

He had hoped to use the proceeds to buy a car because "my previous summer project was going to be fixing up my 3000GT, which I got the engine out of, but never could quite get back in :)."

Hotz has become an overnight media sensation. On Friday, he shined during a slightly surreal interview with CNBC's Erin Burnett, who gushed, "it's amazing what you've done!" (By the way, shouldn't CNBC anchors know what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is? Just asking.)

Hotz was not the type of high school senior to spend his last pre-college summer carousing with friends. Earlier this year he won a $10,000 Intel science prize for a project entitled "I Want a Holodeck," referring to a virtual reality facility from Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Hotz says on his MySpace page that Star Trek gave him "a sense of morality.")

In the competition, Hotz beat "over 1,500 students from 40 countries," according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which awarded the prize in June. His project featured "a full-color, high resolution, 360 degree viewable volumetric display."

This summer, instead of turning his parents house into a brothel, he turned it into a Red Bull-fueled research lab. Who needs Rebecca De Mornay when you have an iPhone to unlock?

"Some of my friends think I wasted my summer, but I think it was worth it," Hotz told the Bergen County Record.

In a video on his MySpace page, Hotz's buddies make fun of him because he would rather "drive robots than go whitewater rafting with some girls." ("Their shirts become wet, George." Response: "Yeah, but where am I driving the robots?")

But in that respect, at least, Hotz appears to be a typical teenage male. Listing who he'd like to meet on his page, Hotz wrote, "Smart Hot Girls are number one."

Hotz, who was unavailable over the weekend, (presumably outfitting his dorm room), lists two other revealing names: Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence researcher, and Ray Kurzweil, a noted futurist, both of whom work at The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Palo Alto think tank.

Singularity refers to a transformational event in the near future when computers become smarter than humans, a la Terminator. Despite its science fiction flavor, the idea has maintained a significant level of interest among computer science academics and tech watchers at large.

Perhaps that's why on his MySpace page, Hotz says he's is not interested in having children: "Love kids, but not for me."

Becoming an overnight teen idol for the tech set is pretty heady stuff for a kid who hasn't seen a day of college. In addition to his hundreds of Facebook "friends" there is a group named "All Hail George Hotz."

In one of the more hilarious posts on the group, one Julia Hotz, who claims she's George's sister, writes:

"i ddont know why you guys are fussing so much over him. i mean its OBVIOUS who has the real talent in the hotz family. george never told you that he inherits his geniusness from his sister ... DUH."

by Sam Gustin