While he was talking, Hotz had been playing with the iPad 2. He planned to spend the night hacking it but needed computer cables. We drove to Fry’s Home Electronics. It was around midnight, and as we approached a desolate intersection, hip-hop cranking from the car’s sound system, the light changed to red. With an angry swerve of the wheel, he cut through an adjoining parking lot and kept driving, muttering, “Fuck these assholes. Stupidest red light ever. It makes no sense at all.

“I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” he went on. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

After high school, Hotz enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology but dropped out a few weeks later, to take up an internship at Google, in Silicon Valley. “We were not surprised or disappointed when he decided to leave school,” his father told me, though he admitted that he sometimes worried about his son, who spent a lot of time alone. Hotz supported himself through donations from people who had downloaded software he’d written and given away free; one program let people jailbreak the iPhone 3GS. His hacks generated enough income that he was able to buy an old white Mercedes. But after a few months he grew bored at Google and in 2009 moved back home to New Jersey. Since his iPhone feat, geeks often sent him devices just to see if he could hack them. That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding the part of the system that he could manipulate into doing what he wanted. Hotz focussed on the “hypervisor,” powerful software that controls what programs run on the machine.

“Nice, but as long as there are readers there will be scrolls.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

To reach the hypervisor, he had to get past two chips called the Cell and the Cell Memory. He knew how he was going to scramble them: by connecting a wire to the memory and shooting it with pulses of voltage, just as he had when he hacked his iPhone. His parents often gave him gifts that were useful for his hobby: after he unlocked the iPhone, they bought him a more expensive one. For Christmas, 2009, they gave him a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar soldering iron. Sitting on the floor of his room, Hotz twisted off the screws of the black PS3 and slid off the casing. After pressing the iron to the wire, he began pulsing the chips.

Next, he had to write an elaborate command that would allow him to take over the machine. Hotz spent long nights writing drafts of the program on his PC, and trying them out on the hypervisor. “The hypervisor was giving me shit,” he recalls. It kept throwing up an error message—the number 5—telling Hotz that he was unauthorized. He knew that, if he got through, he’d see a zero instead. Finally, after several weeks typing at his computer, Hotz had composed a string of code five hundred lines long. He ran it on the PS3 and nervously watched the monitor. The machine displayed a sublime single digit: 0. Hotz called the code his “Finnegans Wake.”

On January 23, 2010, a little more than a month after posting his challenge, Hotz announced on his blog, “I have hacked the PS3.” He later posted instructions for others to do the same, and freely distributed the code. Hotz had hacked the two most iconic and ironclad devices of his generation. “Nothing is unhackable,” he told the BBC. “I can now do whatever I want with the system. It’s like I’ve got an awesome new power—I’m just not sure how to wield it.”

Sony responded by releasing a software update that disabled OtherOS, the feature through which Hotz had accessed the hypervisor. OtherOS enabled the machine to run Linux, the alternative operating system to Microsoft Windows and Apple OS. Running Linux essentially turned the PS3 from a single-purpose gaming console into a desktop computer, which people could use to write programs. They were furious that Sony had robbed them of this capability. “I am EXTREMELY upset,” a comment on Sony’s blog read. Some wanted to rally around Hotz, and organize: “THIS IS MADNESS!!! HACKERS UNITE!!! GEOHOT WILL LEAD US INTO THE LIGHT!” But many were angry at Hotz, not at Sony. “Congratulations geohot, the asshole who sits at home doing nothing than ruining the experience for others,” one post read. Someone posted Hotz’s phone number online, and harassing calls ensued.

Recalling the controversy, Hotz seemed genuinely unfazed. “All those people flaming me, I could care less,” he told me. He spent the summer of 2010 biking through China, and that fall, back at his parents’ house, he read Ayn Rand, which he said made him want to “do something.” “We let him get away with murder,” his father admitted. “But he never did bad things. He always did what he felt was right, and we were happy with that.”

In late December, Hotz decided once again to try to hack the PS3 in a way that would give him total control and let him restore what Sony had removed. On New Year’s Eve, Hotz and some high-school buddies played beer pong and watched the Times Square ball drop on TV. He woke up hung over on the couch at a friend’s house, with a towel stretched across him as a blanket, and stumbled back to his parents’ to fix some macaroni and cheese and think things through. Hotz wanted control of the PS3 metldr (pronounced “metloader”), a part of the software that, functioning like a master key, “lets you unlock everything.”

Hotz knew that the metldr key was hidden within the PS3, but now he realized that he didn’t necessarily have to find and break into the secret place. He could run a special decryption program in a different part of the machine, and make the key appear there. He had to figure out how to speak to the metldr, and then command it to appear. Within ten minutes, he had coded the PS3 hack.

The cursor blinked, indicating that Hotz had the power to do anything with the PS3: install OtherOS, play pirated games, or run obscure Japanese software. He prepared a Web page and a video documenting what he had done. But he hesitated. Although Apple had never sued anyone for jailbreaking, Sony had reacted fiercely to previous modifications of the PlayStation. Sony had also long boasted about the security of the PS3. Hotz wasn’t just undoing years of corporate P.R.; he was potentially opening the door to piracy.

With this concern in mind, Hotz wrote code that disabled the ability to run pirated software using his hack and added a note in his documentation: “I don’t condone piracy.” Still, he wanted a second opinion. Before he put the site live, he signed into an online chat channel where hacker friends hung out, and asked them whether he should release his hack. “Yeah,” one told him. “Information should be free.” Hotz told me, “This is the struggle of our generation, the struggle between control of information and freedom of information.” Also, on the day of the hack, unbeknownst to his parents, Hotz was high. He told me he had taken Vicodin and OxyContin, which filled him with a sense of invulnerability. “You just feel good about everything,” he recalled. He pushed a button on the keyboard and uploaded the instructions for his PS3 jailbreak.

On January 11, 2011, Hotz was playing Age of Empires II on his computer in New Jersey when he received an e-mail from Sony announcing a lawsuit against him. The company requested a temporary restraining order for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and facilitating copyright infringement, such as downloading pirated games. According to the Entertainment Software Association, piracy costs the industry eight billion dollars a year. Sony was also seeking to impound his “circumvention devices,” and it wanted him to take all the instructions offline immediately.

As soon as the news hit the Web, geeks rushed to Hotz’s site, seeking the tools while they could. At Carnegie Mellon University, David Touretzky, a computer scientist and proponent of freedom of information online, made copies of Hotz’s files. Touretzky blogged that Sony was “doing something breathtakingly stupid, presumably because they don’t know any better. . . . Free speech (and free computing) rights exist only for those determined to exercise them. Trying to suppress those rights in the Internet age is like spitting in the wind.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, released a statement saying that the Sony v. Hotz case sent a “dangerous message” that Sony “has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not. We disagree. Once you buy a computer, it’s yours.”

But Sony believed that Hotz’s hack was sending a dangerous message of its own. If people were free to break into their machines, game creators would be cheated out of royalties. Cheaters could tweak the games in order to beat everyone who stuck to the rules. Riley Russell, the general counsel for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, said in a statement at the time, “Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers.”

On January 14th, Hotz went on “Attack of the Show,” a popular news program for gamers on G4, a cable-television network. When the host asked what he was being sued for, Hotz joked, “Making Sony mad.” He was serious, though, about his mission to keep information free. Later, he uploaded a hip-hop video on YouTube, which he titled “The Light It Up Contest.” He sat in front of his Webcam in a blue sweatshirt, his computer in the background. “Yo, it’s geohot,” he rapped, as the beat kicked in, “and for those that don’t know, I’m getting sued by Sony.” It was a surprisingly catchy tune about a complex issue from a whiz kid brazenly striking a pose. Hotz went on, bouncing in his desk chair, “But shit man / they’re a corporation / and I’m a personification / of freedom for all.”

Hotz’s rap earned him sympathy in chat rooms but not in the courts. A California district court granted Sony the restraining order against Hotz, preventing him from hacking and disseminating more details about its machines. It also approved a request by Sony to subpoena information from Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Bluehost, Hotz’s Internet provider, including the Internet Protocol addresses of anyone who downloaded the instructions from his site—a move that further incensed digital-rights advocates. Sony also gained access to records from Hotz’s PayPal account. In some circles, the rebel leader was becoming a martyr. As one fan of Hotz’s posted: “geohot = savior of mankind.”

Martyrs win devotees, and soon Hotz had gained the allegiance of the most notorious hackers: a group called Anonymous. In the past few years, the group has become famous for engineering elaborate online attacks and protests, often in the name of free speech and “lulz,” which is Internet-speak for laughs. Group members fought against the Church of Scientology, which they believed to be suppressing free speech online, and shut down government Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks. More recently, coders have joined the Occupy Wall Street movement, and threatened to release a list of people collaborating with the Zetas, a Mexican drug gang. At the time of the Sony hack, Anonymous had become its own pop-culture meme. On Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert called Anonymous members a “global hacker nerd brigade.” Others referred to them as “the paramilitary wing of the Internet.”

Anonymous is an international, decentralized, shape-shifting hive. All you have to do to join is say you are part of it. No one goes by his or her real name. As in any shadowy group, some members are more extreme than others. A few years ago, I was invited to attend a secret meeting of Anonymous activists, at an Indian restaurant in Hollywood. While Anonymous is often characterized as a group of malicious cyber-terrorists, they struck me more as a group of earnest young protesters with a dark sense of humor and a brilliant knack for viral marketing. Anons, as members call themselves, are the best publicists on the Internet: through social media, they mobilize, inform, outrage, and entertain in ways that the Yippies could never imagine, and they do it all really fast.

In early April, an Anonymous member created an Internet relay chat room called Operation Sony, or #OpSony. “It is the duty of Anonymous to help out this young lad, and to protest against Sony’s censorship,” the mission statement read. Around the world, curious coders logged into their phones and laptops to discuss plans.

As the chat room filled, Anons began digging up personal contact information on Sony’s lawyers and debating the most effective tactics: Flash mobs outside Sony stores? Sending black faxes, which would waste all the ink in their machines? Eventually, they settled on a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, overwhelming Sony’s Web sites with simultaneous visits until they crashed.

On April 4th, Anonymous announced the plan to the public in a press release: “Congratulations, Sony. You have now received the undivided attention of Anonymous. You saw a hornets nest, and stuck your penises in it. You must face the consequences of your actions, Anonymous style.” Within hours, both Sony.com and PlayStation.com were down. Anonymous posted a video on YouTube with its demands: Drop the case against Hotz and allow for modifications on the PS3. Over an image of a Guy Fawkes mask, which the group uses as a symbol, text read, “Leave Fellow hackers like geohot alone.” [#unhandled_cartoon]

Internet protests, like street protests, have a way of spinning out of control. People chant peacefully, but then someone throws a rock through a window and rioting begins. No sooner had the hacker war begun than one Anon declared a splinter faction, SonyRecon, calling for personal hacks against Sony employees and the judge in the geohot case. Other Anons posted the phone numbers, family-member names, and addresses of Sony executives. They even published a description of the C.E.O.’s house, and proposed various methods of attack:

We’ll shit on his doorstep, then run away

dude

you’d shit on someones doorstep

ring the kids school and pull a prank like hes been rushed in hospital:

do you love geohot that much

Back in his parents’ house, in front of the glowing computer screens in his cluttered bedroom, Hotz clicked with mounting apprehension through the news of Anonymous’s plans. “I hope to God Sony doesn’t think this is me,” he remembers thinking. He didn’t believe in secretive online warfare, much less in defecating on someone’s doorstep. “I’m the complete opposite of Anonymous,” he told me. “I’m George Hotz. Everything I do is aboveboard, everything I do is legit.”