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Fravia’s web-searching lore (2009) (biostatisticien.eu)
27 points by homarp on Aug 11, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments


Unfortunately, most of Fravia's googlefu has bitrot since his passing in 2009. I wrote my own guide for contemporary search: https://www.gwern.net/Search


Ah, "reality cracking"!

The Fravia pages are what made me finally "understand" computers. I'd always been into them, and I could program them... but only after Fravia's reverse engineering stuff did I actually understand what was actually going on at the hardware level. Then the search lore pages really changed how I thought about the importance of computers and society.

Years later I ended up with my first taste of "very minor internet fame" by getting some crazy high (for the time) Digg score for a blog post on finding a long-hidden cheat in the pinball game that came with Windows - https://www.mrspeaker.net/2006/01/07/hacking-pinball/ (holy cow, 2006! Feels like yesterday!)... using the techniques I'd picked up from Fravia. Then again years later on the Mac: https://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/01/06/mac-hacking/ - with a post that ends "Thanks for all your help, Fravia.".

Now I'm here in 2020, hacking away on something interesting and sipping on some good Irish whiskey... so once again, thanks for all your help, Fravia!


You'll be remembered always Fravia! For imparting the knowledge and the collective effort to teach RE!


Of course, with 64-bit you really want to use

  xor eax, eax
  inc eax
;)




I do remember fravia’s texts about reality hacking (i think), but i also definitely remember +Orc tutorial about reverse engineering, and i owe them my first crack using wdasm ( what a thrill). Looking at the wikipedia page for +ORC, it seems that his true identity was never found. Is the article up to date ?


+orc must be Satoshi :)


as mentioned in "12 Principles for a Diverging Desktop Future" ( https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2020/08/10/principles... ) about the Arcan Project


thanks for noticing. RiP +Fravia.




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