Facebook snags Geohot | Hacker News Reader

Facebook snags Geohot

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Become a saint to nerds after taking on a company that wont let you do what you want with products you've paid for

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ends up at a company that in no human decipherable terms owns your social identity.

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Who woulda thunk

edit: I think it's worth mentioning, I'm not decrying either he or facebook for their acquisition of talent, it's just an unexpected maneuver. Kind of like a physicist suddenly leaving his craft for the pulpit. Perfectly fine if he wants to do that...just sort of an "oh, that was unexpected".

Everyone has a price, dude.

Oh not disagreeing with you one bit, there.

On top of that Geohot may have some past or future legal bills to pay ;-)

His past legal bills were paid by the thousands of donations he received to "fight the man", which he promptly...didn't. He shouldn't have any future ones unless he plans on engaging in more man-fighting.

He settled without paying Sony and donated the rest to the EFF. That's good enough for me.

And for me as well, although I didn't give him any money. He was taking donations for his legal expenses, and had given every indication that he intended to fight the case through to the end. Were I a donor, that's what I would expect him to do with my money. If I wanted to give money to the EFF (a fine organization well deserving of it), I would have done that instead.

Some construe his settlement as a victory of sorts, and others as a betrayal. I can see validity in both portrayals.

Facebook has tons of bright developers that other bright developers like to be around, and even if they're not all primarily motivated by the potential value of their options, it does create a self-sustaining black hole...

Not unlike Google.

I don't think it's fair to discuss any perceived moral problem around this. Facebook pays well and you get to work with some very smart people on a far-reaching product. That's a good job.

How does paying well and being full of nerds obviate a moral dilemma? If working for facebook is morally wrong (feel free to argue on this one), then neither of those conditions changes things. It can be both a smart move for geohot, as well as an immoral one.

Again, I'm not saying that working for facebook is bad. I'm saying that it's rightness or wrongness is not determined by how well they pay or how many geeks they employ.

It is does not obviate any moral dilemma, I simply believe in geohot's right to his own moral choice. He is a human being with his own self-interests and free will; he should not be imbued with heroic obligations to the geek community.

Fair enough. Were I in his position I'd likely feel uncomfortable with the public persona that had grown around me and the expectations of the geek community.

He received a lot of flak for settling with Sony when many of his supporters expected him to "fight the man"--and win. It was likely a smart decision for him personally. That said, he took donations from people who expected that those donations would be used to defend our right to pull apart anything we buy. I guess the disappointment in geohot comes from seeing someone (rightly or wrongly) who championed the values that a lot of us hold weaselling his way out of the fight. Joining facebook is a fairly ignominious end to that tale.

Maybe he didn't want the publicity, maybe he didn't want to be an activist, and maybe he resented the expectations that were placed on him. We (the geek community) had expectations of geohot, not George Hotz. It was the character, not the man, that we liked. Maybe he was just tired of playing that role.

Maybe he is just an opportunist.

And he is young, Ive seen people in their late 20s with more opportunistic and naive behaviour. Especially those "I have a startup" and acting like they are the pope. Just like the majority of people geohotz likes flair and tail, he can get both now that he is under zuckerbergs command. Morality or freedom be damned falir and tail he is gonna get.

Working for facebook is not morally wrong. How could anyone think it is?

You can't have morals if you're starving ;p

You have to give Facebook credit for actively recruiting talent. Probably overpaying and distorting the labor market in SV even more than usual. Surprised Apple wouldn't try to hire him.

Apple certainly would have been the logical fit. Their response to his work suggested begrudging admiration more than Sony's outright hostility.

yeah he should live like richard stallman to preserve his saintly purity. /sarcasm.

dude is a great hacker. facebook is one of the greatest places to be a great hacker.

a perfect place? no. but what place is?

Google? Two, three years ago google was the place where all the great hackers worked at. Suddenly they are like, meh, you know...

Samsung?

I don't have a facebook account, they don't own me. I surrender instead to other forces. ;P

What's with the anti-Facebook sentiment? It's worse than anti-Microsoft sentiments. Facebook does lots of cool stuff, a lot of it open source.

I think people resent how Facebook is trying to become the web, in similar way to how AOL did (remember when some companies advertised AOL keywords). They are doing this on top of a platform that is closed, and is mostly a black box for your data. That doesn't mean they don't produce some cool open source technologies, it just means they use them on massive closed source platform.

1. You can import your data into Facebook. You can't export - all you get is Facebook UUIDs back.

2. Privacy options are made deliberately difficult as Facebook (as they've stated before) want you to share as much as you can. Setting anything to 'me only' is buried under a custom setting you have to repeat for everything you don't want shared.

1. Sure you can, go to Account Settings > Download Your Information (second from bottom). 2. I'm very much with you on this one. The privacy settings should be easier.

1. Of your friends, you just get a list of names, not any contact information whatsoever.

The argument is friends' contact info belongs to your friends, not to you. Its a social grey area that has been created by the internet, the correct protocols have yet to be defined.

I can access my friends contact info (including email addresses and phone numbers) as I like, within FB's platform. FB just restricts me from accessing that once I;m not longer connected to it. Indeed, you're right - that's the argument - but I suspect it's merely used as a justification to FB's commercial benefit.

Yes, but the question was about downloading what you put in, not what other people put in that you happen to have access to.

I put in email addresses. I can't get them out.

Facebook has several features requesting users to add not only their username but passwords to other websites, to add friends. The same can not be said of Facebook [0]. The CEO is allegedly said to take advantage of journalists who provided their details to access journalists' private emails [1].

[0] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/google-facebook-data/

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-in...

As is the way it should be; by befriending you on Facebook I'm not saying that you are free to import my contact information into any old service that may use it to spam me.

Respectfully, I don't think you actually read my comment in its entirety. You can import email addresses into FB, but you can't get them out, along with a whole bunch of other info. FB UUIDs have zero meaning outside Facebook.

Zuckerberg broke into the emails of journalists he thought could damage him back in the college days, and he called his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him. The way Zuckerberg is idolized for his success and even held up as a role model(!) when it was achieved through unethical means is symptomatic of a lot of my least favorite things about society. The fact that the essential character of Facebook is trying to leverage people's social connections for the purpose of marketing is highly distasteful to me as well.

He sits in front of me. I'm surprised the news didn't leak out sooner. He's a cool dude. I don't see any of the perceived threats hinted in the comments.

Can you shed any light on what is role at Facebook is? My guess would be that he has been tasked with improving security.

If I had to guess... I bet he's playing a significant role in their mobile strategy. Maybe related, a story broke last week with MG that they want to deploy a platform, via the browser.

Project Spartan - http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/facebook-project-spartan

In case you haven't seen it, here's an awesome story on how FB hired Chris Putnam: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Chris-Putnam-get-hired-at-Faceb...

He hacked Facebook in 2005 and they hired him. From what I've heard he was one of their most invaluable engineers.

Lol!

AIUI, Geohot is basically forbidden from working with anything Sony.

So to the extent he becomes an essential part of the security team at Facebook, I guess Sony just lawsuited their way out of deep partnership opportunities with the biggest social media platform to date.

Facebook would pass over business deals to serve a grudge of one of their low level employees?

No, I qualified it with "to the extent he becomes an essential part of the security team", and no, it's not a "grudge" it's a condition of out-of-court settlement as I understand it.

Yes, the comment was a little over-the-top.

But think NDAs. That kind of thing can definitely complicate business deals.

Guess he gotta pay legal bills. But wasn't he an intern at Google doing maps? Dude's super talented.

confused

I'd love to get my hands on all of that private info too.

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