RIP Fravia ~S~ Fjalar Ravia – 1952-20092

It’s been widely reported that Fravia passed away on Sunday, May 3 2009.

Legendary searcher and programmer Fravia became widely known in the mid-to-late nineties for his essays on reverse engineering. Focusing on the ideological aspect of reversing, as a way to achieve knowledge of the inner workings of society and the market, rather than on piracy or software vandalism, Fravia influenced a whole generation of computer users who wished to learn more about x86 assembly language, software internals, undocumented operating system features and low level debugging.

During his later years he devoted to teaching and exploring the art of searching the Deep Web, focusing on techniques to enable a searcher(identified by ~S~) find any kind of information online. Fravia’s searching tutorials include advanced techniques for many types of information retrieval. Fravia made heavy use of symbolism and allegory to transmit information. Software reversers were often identified by placing a + prefix to their nicknames. A most senior reverser, known only as ORC had the highest ranked prefix, ++ORC, as a tribute to his higher knowledge of low level programming and binary software analysis.

In 2007 Fravia reported he had cancer. His battle with the disease lasted 2 years. When, in late April 2009, he finally got word from his physician that the metastasis had gotten out of control and that the situation was irreversible, he gave us a Sweet and Sour goodbye on a page called swangsong.htm.

As of May 11 2009 all of Fravia’s sites are down(update: they’ve been put back up as of late May 2009). A tribute was posted by members of his family on his home page shortly after his passing. I hope they can restore the sites and maintain them online as a most valuable source of timeless information, although Fravia did empower his followers to search and find caches and copies of his teachings even with his sites taken offline. As he put it, he gave us all “powerful weapons” for seeking knowledge.

May his memory live forever through the knowledge he so kindly shared with us all throughout the years.