Fravia’s web-searching lore (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Fravia’s web-searching lore (2009)

search.lores.eu

112 pointsjtaft24 comments

Searchlores at the time was a disappointing pivot from Fravia's pages of reverse engineering. Searchlores was all about advanced search techniques and finding the unfindable; reverse engineering was about decoding binaries and knowing the unknowable. Little did I then realize that Fravia had the foresight to see what the internet will become, and that instead of stepping through binaries in SoftICE in search of understanding, we'll be drowned in open-source code that'll never be read.

Some background on the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

Very interesting guy. It was an odd coincidence to see the quality of Google's search results drop drastically shortly after his death... and now if you try some of the "advanced techniques" that he describes, Google is likely to block you for looking like a bot.

It's like if Umberto Eco decided to go into programming instead.

I remember being 12 years old and obsessively reading through fravia's pages into the morning in the mid-90's. On a whim, I e-mailed +orc. He responded so kindly that it had a significant effect on my interests and attitudes. I'll always remember that time fondly. It's too bad fravia passed. His legacy lives on in those he influenced.

I wonder what is out there today that feels like the enlightenment that fravia's writing provided back then. The links between technology and philosophy, in its original meaning as the love of knowledge. Fravia really helped form my worldview. Going back and reading it again, it doesn't feel the same due to how the internet unfolded over the last 20 years.

I wish I had thought to reach out! Glad they were nice!

To put his work in context: He taught people how to identify a Russian medal (IIRC, it was 20 years ago..) before image search or tabbed browsers were a thing. Even if there had been image search, most people would not have had the bandwidth to go through a few hundred image results visually...

Good old Fravia - I didn't know he is already no longer with us. May he rest in peace. His writings were inspiring in the late 90's. He sparked curiosity for a deeper understanding of how computers work, from the bottom up. His resources were accessible, non-academic, creative reflections on computing and information technology. Knowledge is power and he taught us young nerds how to gain access to it.

This brings back memories. Fravia was ahead of his time.

Fravia! I thought he was gone for good. He got me into Opera which remained my browser of choice for 15 years? more?? I used to print his webpages off into plastic sleeves inside huge A4 binders and read them at school. Him and RMS definitely helped raise the bar about how the world could and should be at an impressionable age.

oh, he died. I guess he is gone for good. What an interesting person ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia

If I remember correctly he has a daughter? It would be interesting to get an interview from her. Fravia was a big inspiration as a teenager.

yeah... have forgotten some of these things. data reverse engineering? who remembers that.. http://search.lores.eu/realicra/finn_de1.htm http://search.lores.eu/bg_weird.htm http://search.lores.eu/angewalk.htm

another mirror of the software side, still alive, is here: http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/papers.htm

The +orc posts were the best reverse engineering posts at the time, I never understood what happened with it.

I just had a look at +orc wikipedia page, and it says his identity isn’t known. Yet i’m pretty sure i’ve read a post on HN or a comment, a long time ago, implying otherwise... anyone knows more ?

As far as I'm aware, no one is still looking as Fravia is dead and +Orc hasn't posted publicly in decades.

I always thought they were the same person. Fravia was operating at a time when reverse engineering was very dangerous legally. Creating an anonymous persona to publish these tutorials makes perfect sense. I'm sure he knew how to mask his writings to look like someone from a vague location in Europe. Read and wrote latin, accomplished linguist, +Orc quoted many Latin phrases and obscure references to old texts, estimated ages of +Orc lines up with Fravia etc.

Only people that ever conclusively stated that +Orc was not Fravia was Fravia himself and others in the HCU.

Probably the same guy. So much has been lost to time that I doubt anyone will ever known one way or the other. Friends probably do, but they would have no reason to give up that secret and probably helped spread disinformation.

That's my conspiracy theory for the day.

At the time I came across +fravia I believed that +Orc was a real person, but like you nowadays I'm more inclined to believe they were one and the same.

Regardless I remember finding the reversing pages in the early 90s and learning a lot. I was disappointed by the pivot to the search-based site, but regardless Fravia himself was a huge influence on me, and I was saddened to learn of his passing.

http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Orc.htm :).

Chrome will display a warning about the page being unsafe. woodmann.com had a bunch of reversing stuff on their forums. Use wget or something if concerned.

Discussed in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13291494

I miss him. Anyone got a list of the "hidden" pages on searchlores?

Wish I could vote this up more than just once.

Are there any modern takes on the objectives that Fravia was trying to achieve?

I hadn't heard of him before, just starting to check out his essays. Great stuff!

Only gee, what an irritating and unfriendly style, throwing in a phrase in Latin in every other sentence, or even entire section titles—as if all his readers will understand it? or not caring?—just makes it really bad prose, there's no way to get around that. And "the unwashed"?!

edit: "He'll be honing onto his target", "being a tag paranoid is probably a good idea", "You'r"...ah ok, the English is bad too. That was surprising, from someone posing as a master of language.

It's funny how the perception of style has changed, reading Fravia's writings now has a similar feeling to reading a book from the early 20th century. However, I can safely say that he wrote far better than the majority of the other reverse-engineers at the time.

The target audience was a type of reader who would look something up when not understanding it.

The whole point of this site was to enter it and to extend one's comfort zone.

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