- Fravia
Fravia is a pseudonym/handle for a European cracker (his real name, according to his autobiography, is Fjalar Ravia) who is probably best known for his web archive of
reverse engineering techniques and papers. Mirrors of the old web site (fravia.org) still exist (see, e.g.,Internet Archive ), though Fravia has publicly requested their removal in favor of his new web-searching-centric sites.He leads people from becoming 'crackers' to reversers, both in the sense of software reverse engineering, and as an ideology. He is strongly against advertisements, software user-restrictions, and what he claims to be needless software protectionism. He is interested in written history, language, information theory, and is known to speak Finnish, German, English, Italian, Spanish and French.
His principal interests are now advanced web searching techniques, e.g. how to write your own search bots, how to "cut through the web" to your targets using special search strings (webbits), and how to find on the deep Web anything that could have been digitized, "inter alia" unknown music pieces, rare books or images whose names you don't even know or remember.
His anti-commercial attitude is well known: there is not a single banner or advertisement on his sites.
Similarly, his [http://www.searchlores.org/mines.htm writings and workshops] always underline and demonstrate his belief that the very structure of the web was made for sharing, not hoarding or selling.
Since October 2000, Fravia got in touch with
Richard Stallman at a LinuxDay event in Milan to which they were invited by a common friend. This meeting induced Fravia to start exploring and helpingfree software and free culture. He is also a friend of [http://www.reverse-engineering.net Zero aka Dr. Thorsten Schneider] , a reverse code engineering legend who holds up old free traditions such as the +sign or the [http://www.crackmes.de crackmes website] from old times to current days and is supposed to keep Fravia's flag of free RCE knowledge.As of September 9th 2008, Fravia has stopped updating his site after being diagnosed and receiving treatment for 2 separate tumours [http://www.fravia.com/illness.htm] .
External links
* [http://www.fravia.com/whoiam.htm Fravia's auto-biography]
* [http://woodmann.com/fravia/index.htm Last known mirror of the original "reversing site"]
* [http://skyscraper.fortunecity.com/true/461/ "Please help me to close the old mirrors" notice]
* [http://www.fravia.com/main.htm Fravia's "Powersearching" page]
* [http://www.fravia.com/rabbits.htm Fravia's "Webbits" page]
* [http://www.fravia.com/longtermsearching.htm Fravia's "Long term searching" advice]
* [http://www.archive.org/details/Recon2005_Fravia Video of a Fravia conference presentation at Recon 2005 in Montreal]
* [http://www.archive.org/details/Fravia_Reversing_our_searching_habits_Power_searching_without_google Video of a Fravia conference presentation at Recon 2006 in Montreal]
* [http://www.fravia.com/io13.htm Biographical information about Fravia]References
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