QIRA: Timeless Debugging by geohot [video] | Hacker News Reader

QIRA: Timeless Debugging by geohot [video]

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94 pointsalpb20 comments

I met geohot at a starcraft tournament at Facebook probably like four years ago. I turned around and saw his employee badge and exclaimed "You're geohot!"

He then proceeded to tell me about his killer idea for a timeless, replayable debugging tool that'd run circles around IDA. Glad to see it's starting to come together. That guy is super interesting.

RR from Mozilla is interesting tool too: http://rr-project.org/

Microsoft has IDNA, which is usually known to customers as time travel tracing and has a lot of similarities to qira. Unfortunately only Microsoft employees have access to the bits to analyze the resulting trace files you get - it'd be really nice of them to open it up.

I came here to mention this specifically. I'd love, love, love access to it, but they won't even let fairly close partners have access. :\

I actually like it. Anyone has an idea on what happens when you try to qira a network based application. For example, imagine you try to debug a client but you don't know how server behaves (TCP Stack etc...). It might be a possibility that not catching all states that client might have.

"I was the first person to unlock the iPhone"

It's unfortunate that he actively spreads this lie.

...wasn't he the first person to unlock the iPhone? Not jailbreak, but unlock. While his blog was still up, he talked about cracking open the first-gen iPhone and getting JTAG, modifying the state of the baseband as it was running.

I don't think anyone did that before he did.

@comex: "sounds like geohot all right. https://t.co/busnrUz2hX"

@geekable: "@comex If I'm reading this correctly, he's bragging about stealing Vicarious IP. Great plan there"

@littlesteve: "@geekable @comex that's exactly what he did, again sounds exactly like him"

@SylerClayton: "@littlesteve @geekable @comex Yeah, no surprise there. I respect some of his past work, but would it hurt the guy to be a little less cocky?"

@littlesteve: "@SylerClayton @geekable @comex he has always been a little theify, it's his arrogance of "I don't need a team I can do it better"

@SylerClayton: "@littlesteve @geekable @comex Didn't he leak some of @Mathieulh's work dumping metldr on the PS3 or did he do all by himself?"

@Mathieulh: "@SylerClayton @littlesteve @geekable @comex he didn't do shit, I trusted him with my work and he leaked it. Then I had to document it all just to prove that it was indeed mine, even though I had not planned a public release that soon."

@marcan42: "He also gave no credit for our ECDSA fail research until I complained to him."

@littlesteve: "@marcan42 @SylerClayton @geekable @comex @Mathieulh that's our geohot right there"

@marcan42: "And AIUI he was the "first" to unlock (not JB) an iPhone but based on others' work."

Source: https://twitter.com/comex/status/709868908161929216

@comex, @Mathieulh and @marcan42 of @fail0verflow are very respected members of the community. I worked personally with @comex to develop the kernel exploit used in https://github.com/wiiudev/libwiiu. I can attest that he's one of the nicest and smartest hackers I've ever met and helped me learn a great deal about exploit research and development. Take these words with a grain of salt if you must, but I wouldn't immediately disregard the statements of @geohots peers regarding his character...I'm not contesting that he's brilliant (he certainly is and I can respect that). I'm just saying he seems to be a bit of an egomaniac and sociopath.

Tidbits like that are what muddy his otherwise notable achievements. He doesn't do himself a favor with that, but that behavior works in other industries, so maybe he just got influence from the wrong places. Or maybe he knows very well what he's doing with the media and is smart. I cannot tell.

There were multiple sources stated that he was indeed the first person to come public about iPhone carrier unlock. [1] Unless you have proof otherwise

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#iOS_device_securit...

Wow, the guy definitely is a genius, but boy does he seem annoying in that video.

So I know him from high school. We had a teacher who taught english by assigning a vast number of essays. George was not the most motivated of students, and decided that there was no way the teacher was reading all the essays. So he took a first page of English, put spanish homework in the middle, and put a last page of English on the back. It got an F.

(Why is he geohot? Because it was first three of first name, first three of lastname for usernames at my school)

Eh... I'll take the good with the bad. I have massive respect for the guy.

Funny I tend to think is way overrated and people are conflating works of many under his name (for instance he didn't crack the ps3).

ps: first time I see him speak longer, he's pretty energetic and inspiring I have to admit.

pps: the second part I see he's still in his battle-mindset again fakely valued tech companies.

True, but it's not like he is a total fraud, for the PS3 he was the one behind the memory glitching bug, which was an important step forward.

Fair enough. To be honest my issue comes from the self made man self driven car - david vs goliath thing he conveys often. I understand the fact that businesses have suboptimal structures and negative incentives in terms of engineering and technical prowess. And we all want real and beautiful innovation to happen as quick as possible. But his mashup of computer vision hooked into the electronic steering control was way less impressive to me than to the iphone/ps3 era crowd. Especially considering the social aspect of a ton of steel moving in public.

He gave a 15 minute speech on reverse engineering, then spoke for 4 minutes about self-driving cars...

In such a short time, what were you expecting him to achieve? (re: "social aspect of a ton of steel moving in public")

Not talking about this talk in particular, but the other interviews and his overall message.

Try this one: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg

... then ran away after barking like that.

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