Fravia
Francesco Vianello (30 August 1952 – 3 May 2009), better known by his nickname Fravia (sometimes +Fravia or Fravia+), was a software reverse engineer, who maintained a web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. He also worked on steganography. He taught on subjects such as data mining, anonymity and stalking. Vianello spoke six languages (including Latin) and had a degree in the history of the early Middle Ages. He was an expert in linguistics-related informatics. For five years he made available a large quantity of material related to reverse engineering through his website, which also hosted the advice of reverse engineering experts, known as reversers, who provided tutorials and essays on how to hack software code as well as advice related to the assembly and disassembly of applications, and software protection reversing. Vianello's web presence dates from 1995 when he first got involved in research related to reverse code engineering (RCE). In 2000 he changed his focus and concentrated on advanced internet search methods and the reverse engineering of search engine code. His websites "www.fravia.com" and "www.searchlores.org" contained a large amount of specialised information related to data mining. His website "www.searchlores.org" has been called a "very useful instrument for searching the web", and his "www.fravia.com" site has been described as "required reading for any spy wanting to go beyond simple Google searches." There are still several mirrors of Fravia's old websites, even though the original domain names are no longer functional. The last mirror of Search Lores linked originally by Fravia directly from his website ("search.lores.eu") went offline in February 2020, but a new mirror came to existence later in 2020 at fravia.net. As Francesco Vianello In the 1980s, he was a member of the Esteban Canal chess club in Venice, before moving to CES in Brussels. Graduated in history at the University of Venice in 1994, Vianello had a master's degree in history and philosophy in 1999. He was interested in studying the arts and humanities and was aiming to build a collective knowledge on the particular subject of learning and Web-searching as an art. He spoke six languages (including Latin). Fravia participated as a speaker in the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. His lecture was on the subject of Hacking. As Fravia Vianello was focusing on privacy and created the myth of Fjalar Ravia (aka fravia+, msre, Spini, Red Avenger, ~S~ Sustrugiel, Pellet, Ravia F.) as protection from hostile seekers. At least two distinct phases of his internet public work can be identified. The first, from 1995 (starting date of his internet presence) to 1999 was related to software reversing, software protection, decompiling, disassembling, and deep software code deconstruction. At those times the WDasm disassembler by Eric Grass, which also included a debugger, was a popular download. The second, starting in 2000, where the first stage left off, was focused on an (apparently) entirely different field: Internet Knowledge search. In February 2001, Vianello made a conference at the École Polytechnique in Paris about "The art of information searching