Back in the 1990's, there existed a small corner of the web hosted on geocities ... dedicated to reverse engineering. Back at a time when software cracking was serious business and very little knowledge was shared, Fravia+ was generous and open-handed for those willing to work themselves to learn. He later got banned and found a new home at : searchlores

Around the mid 90's with the large legal battles fought over software cracking (which is only a subset of reversing) Fravia+ decided to pivot his teaching to 'search lore' that is advanced web searching, and mitigating the ability of centralized agencies to 'spy' on users. Mostly it was a series of articles and tools that allows one to find *anything* they may be looking for in the piles of piles of 'useless' information that a general search engine will provide.

Fravia+ was a linguist (translator) for his day-job, and had a degree in medieval studies. There were often tricks hidden in his text, (as well as much stenography in the images on his sites). This gave him great insight into reconstructing information specially as it related to searching hidden indexes and the un-archived deep web. (this was long before the 'dark web' of onion routing)

Fravia was fiercely anti-commercial. Not only in his philosophy and writing, but also in giving explicit tools to defeat commercial censorship and snooping. (add the commercial host name to the local .HOSTS file mapped to 127.0.0.1, and it won't load their advertising servers) His sites would have actively hostile elements for Internet Explorer (often used as a default for script-bots) as well as honeypots of useless generated fake-email address to confuse spam harvesters.

Some useful ideas he presented are :

Password cracking to gain access to databases
Searching essays
Searching Usenet
Tools, hiders, banner killers, memory readers, etc...
Compound and Meta search engines

and much much more ... like

Techniques for Short Term searching
Long Term searching the Deep deep web
How to Evaluate search results
Advanced stalking, searching, combing
Anonymity lessons

And this is all just a small snippet of the tricks and tools to be found in these tomes. Many of the direct links are long since gone ... .what has stayed consistent in the world-wide-web since the early 2000's? ... yet this information that is 20 years out of date is still as current as the day it was written if not more-so. .

There is greater commercial surveillance, there is more centralization of information, and there are MAGNITUDES greater amount of raw information available to all of us. Having the skills to comb through all the noise to find exactly the piece of knowledge we require is the most useful skill any digital technology user could need.

The information is deep. It's much more a sharing of his philosophy as a software-reverser (read the realty-reversing sections) the methodology of thinking he used to look and evaluate results that lead to greater understanding. Something that many Crypto-users resonate with. The desire for privacy, for knowing how things 'tick'. for understanding complex systems .... The knowledge presented in these mirrors can feed a man for a lifetime. a far cry from the bite-sized blog snippets of knowledge often shared today ... If you love deep understanding, please consider a tip