Hocevar was born in Forbach, Moselle, France. From 1995 to 1997, he took preparatory classes at the Lycée Fabert in Metz, Moselle, France. He graduated in 2002 from École centrale Paris, after receiving the "Award of Information Technology and Communication" from the SNCF as the most promising student in his class. He specialized in electromechanical systems and applied mechatronics, and project management. From 2005 to 2006, Hocevar was a Wikimedia France board member. Hocevar has been active in the Debian project, and was elected Debian project leader on 17 April 2007. Hocevar's Debian leadership platform stated a preference for finishing larger numbers of small projects in succession, echoing the Japanese management philosophy of Kaizen that constant, incremental improvements to a project would generate more gains per unit of time than large single leaps of performance. Hocevar was succeeded by Steve McIntyre on 16 April 2008. Hocevar has also contributed to the VideoLAN project. He has made large contributions to almost all software of the VideoLAN project, especially to VLC media player and libdvdcss, since 1998. He is the author of various free software programs, such as, a data fuzzer, and libcaca, a color ASCII art renderer. He is also the current maintainer of the Extension Language KitScheme interpreter, which has found use in many multimedia applications including audio processing. Hocevar has worked on reverse engineering and image processing. He reverse engineeredDVD subtitles in 2000, and in 2005, it was found that the DRM software which triggered the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal had unlawfully pirated open source code from the VideoLAN project which Hocevar was involved in authoring. Hocevar's experience in image processing includes authoring a CAPTCHA decoding framework called PWNtcha. PWNtcha was the first CAPTCHA decoder framework to defeat multiple CAPTCHAs and was referred to as the "most famous" CAPTCHA breaker in a 2009 Stanford University publication. Hocevar authored the WTFPL version 2, an extremely liberal, permissive free software license that is recognized by the Free Software Foundation. He has also been cited for his "whimsical" copyleft activism. Hocevar is part of Goatse Security, an information security working group which revealed a security flaw in AT&T's website, leading to the release of 114,000 email addresses of Apple iPad users.
