The Light It Up Contest -- geohot
geohot1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2011–2025
music · general · 2011–2025 on HN
A one-minute rap by George Hotz (geohot) aimed at Sony, made as an entry for a contest while Sony was suing him over the PS3 jailbreak. It is a humorous diss track delivered from the middle of the lawsuit.
HN mostly brings it up as a funny, cocky artifact of the Hotz-versus-Sony fight, sometimes with a skeptical eye on how seriously he took the lawsuit.
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8 comments from Hacker News
Oh yes, Sony at it, again. link I have since never bought a Sony, although I really loved their products. Here's geohot's brilliant reply: ▶ this video
Well he called sony fudge packers in a youtube rap dis track after they sued him so I wouldn't hold my breath on that one ▶ this video
He has explored other heavy hitting strategies too. Rap Battle: ▶ this video When the rap battle didn't work, (probably) causing a $171M outage and getting away with it: link Absolute legend.
Obligatory George Hotz (geohot) PS3 rap from back then: ▶ this video First time he appeared in the PS3 jailbreak scene I was like "wait, is this a Romanian?! Some boy-genius expat?!" because George is a common first name here and (fun fact) Hotz means "thief". Actually it is written hoț but Romanian teens sometimes write tz instead of ț. He was meant to be a key thief, I guess. I still wonder if they got to examine the video in the courtroom...
How funny that this pops up just a few hours after I looked into it again. It's an exciting product. Even if it has no direct use, I feel better being driven around by an open piece of software that I could in theory inspect and change. Closed-source stuff is just a black box expected to do magic. Doesn't feel good. The story behind the man is quite interesting as well. When I was 9 he was the guy I got the jailbreaks from that would allow me to install cool tweaks and other non-standard software Apple wouldn't allow on my iPod Touch 3G. Apart from this, I think this rap [ ▶ this video ] he published when he was sued by Sony for allowing alternative operating systems to be installed onto the PlayStation 3 demonstrates his attitude quite well (admittedly the self driving situation is more complicated, but what a response to a law suit). You might guess that I'm still a GeoHot fan. While I'm not sure this will be competitive with commercial systems in the future, I'd love it. Having the world's best self driving system be free for everyone to inspect and use in their cars would be a societal gain similar to that of Linux. Open Pilot will be the only self driving system retrofittable to older cars (by consumers themselves), which is already very cool (it's just unfortunate that none of the cars are old enough for me to consider buying). I wish them the best of luck (and may they get the tests to a level at which everyone is happy with them).
He does a bit of interesting projects, hacking the iPhone, Android and even the PS3 to the point of being sued by Sony [1]. Geohot has potential, so it will be interesting what we see him accomplish, hopefully some company doesn't swoop in and ruin his progress. [1]: ▶ this video
Not overly fruitful to conversation, but despite myself I love that GeoHot entered an online rapping contest by trying to battle Sony verbally. ▶ this video I honestly think he could outdo more than a couple of their signed artists, is the funny part.
While I'm morally completely against Sony's point of view, I'm not sure if there's much that can be done legally. Besides that, I'm a bit unsure about donating to a guy who does not seem to realize what kind of mess he's in: ▶ this video