awards

(This above is an "award" made by Tapu :-)

And you may want to have a look at the award made by Master DaVinci as well

Comments and writings about Fravia's site

Fravia's awards (I have decided to publish only one per month)

June 1996
Fravia's page of reverse engineering may have few links, but it's much more worth than tons of useless pages and useless links
~ Computer Underground, June 1996, Pag.23

July 1996
"Le meilleur Didacticiel qui existe et de loin: +ORC Cracking Tutorial (En plus les leçons sont récentes et il y en a costamment des nouvelles). Vous pouvez trouver les versions les plus récentes sur la page de Fravia (Meilleure page pour apprendre à déplomber à mon avis)"
~ Le hacking/cracking/phreaking pour les golios, July 1996, pag.3

August 1996
"Fravia's page of reverse engineering is a real goldmine for newbyes"
~Internet surfing, August 1996, Insert "Hackingworld", Pag.2

September 1996
"Let's end by saying that Fravia's page gave best performance on information in relation to spending money for internet account and time"
~ Christian Teroerde, "On the net", September 1996, Pag.17

October 1996
Amazing page: Fravia's page of reverse engineering at... will help your journey to the land beyond trivial surfing
~ Nexor (uk), "Net Juwels", October 1996, Page 3

November 1996
"The material on Fravia's page of reverse engineering is brought together into a coherent whole that is very rare. Finding this page is like finding a single, brilliant diamond among thousands of common stones"
~ Kevin Lee Legge, "Review of the Web", November 1996, Page 11

December 1996
"The information on Fravia's site is fantastic. It has really helped me much to understand the "inner workings" of this hunk of metal and silicon in front of me.
~ M. A. Kedfrog "A 1996 Insider report", December 1996, Page 2

January 1997
Fravia's page of reverse engineering quoted as The Best the
Web has To Offer at http://www.x1.net:80/~core/riotlynx.html :-)

February 1997
"I stumbled across your site while looking for information on 8086 disassemblers. All I can say is that it's by far the most interesting and useful creation I've ever come across. We're cancelling my wife's Compuserve account in your honor"
~ johnb(at)interlog(point)com, February 1997

March 1997
"I don't really know how I stumbled onto Fravia's page of reverse engineering. I spent the best part of the day with my mouth open. I have found my Shan-gri-la"
~ Gerald Hartig, "Perusing the dark sides", Webintern N.52, March 1997

April 1997
"... Fravia provides this excellent web page for those of us who wish to learn more about the Internet we live in"
~ T. Oadlip, "Catching trends", PC-Web N.11, April 1997, p.27

May 1997
"Now, your site means a lot to me and I can learn something new there every time I visit. Thank you for maintaining it for so long, even in the face of censorship.
~ saltine(at)anon(point)nymserver(point)com, May 1997

June 1997
"...I have learned enough on your pages to stop the lamers from hacking my code, and I don't care how long they want to try. If they hack it, I will just make it more secure."
~ 73553(point)3111(at)compuserve(point)com, June 1997

July 1997
...Fravia should be aware of the fact that he's loosing good money: I've never had such a "high" perusing a site without paying for it!
~ Direct PC World, Issue 134, page 16, July 1997

August 1997
"...I just wanted to let you know that the work you are doing is appreciated. I must admit that I am some what of a lamer... you know, one of those stupid programmers, but I am in the process of changing that
~ Mike Coker, 17 August 1997

September 1997
"Hey. Nice reverse engineering page. I saw the thing on Kremlin... I'm the author of Kremlin! Oops! Well, I guess next time I'll spend more time on the protection scheme -- I concentrated on making a good program, not making a good protection scheme. Kremlin 2.0 will be really cool and will, now, have better security features and won't be as stupid"
~ Mark Rosen, Mach5 Software, http://www.mach5.com/, 30 September 1997

October 1997
"Fravia's page of reverse engineering at... has been named Best of the Web in the Computing Channel by the editors of Snap! Online. (http://www.snap.com) In order to find your review, submit a search for your site in the channel listed above. Then click on #2: Web Sites; you'll find your site listed in the Best of the Web section. Being named with the Best of the Web designation allows you access to the Snap! Online "Best of the Web" logo, which you can merchandise in many different ways. One of the easiest ways to gain recognition of your "Best of the Web" status..."
~Vin Diec vind(at)cnet(point)com, 31 Oct 1997
Typical bogus award, I publish this only in order to put all of you on guard: there are more and more small organisations that practicize what I would call "reverse awarding": they are not very important and they try to ACQUIRE importance (and hits) finding some gullible webmaster ready to publish their logos in good position on his site (which I of course will not do: quelle vulgaritÈ... besides, this logo is not even aesthetically appealing). I will probably loose this "Best of the Web" award, after publishing these lines, yet I got so many other that I could not care less :-) "merchandise"... what for an awful attitude!
What can you learn from this? Quite a lot! As soon as you see a page that has lot of counters and "awards logo" in 'pole position', (as opposed to hide them the more discretely possible), you know that you can immediatly point your browser elsewhere... it's an important signal, like the so-called "gold" versions of all major credit cards! In fact as soon as you see a guy using a "golden" credit card (proud and haughty to have paid more for next to nothing :-) you can be sure that you have met an idiot

November 1997
"Fravia is one of my favorite sites of the Net.
His "reverse engineering" studies and exposes of embedded applets in these new languages are invaluable. A few hours of reading his collection of studies gives folks like me a whole new perspective on how to debug our own applications. Altough Fravia focuses on protection schemes, those are the only ones widely distributed and available worldwide as study targets. My world has many many occurrences of code taking wrong branches that has nothing to do with protection schemes... but the tracing algorithms I learn from him are extremely useful to me in finding out, for instance, why a motor does not turn like it was supposed to in a robotic welder, or how to port ancient software to use different hardware, to substitute for hardware that is no longer available"
~ NODE (nƒ_053), November 1997, pag. 12

December 1997
"School taught me how to write code... Fravia is teaching me how to make it work. One of the hardest things I have ever had to do was to take someone else's code, sans support, sans source, sans even the company who made the product ten years ago, and make it work.
Fravia+ is a priceless gem."
~ Gary: roawwr(at)pacbell(point)net

January 1998
Dear fravia, thanks a lot for your site -- it is great! I've got a lot of lessons from here as a shareware programmer. By the way, you host a very interesting article telling how to crack my own program (Advanced Disk Catalog, old version, though) there (just to let you know who am I). The protection, of course, was really stupid. I've improved it a little bit in the latest version (version 1.20, this is not an invitation to crack it, btw :) Anyway, I wish you luck -- please continue your good work. I think every shareware programmer should visit your site before releasing his/her "brand-new uncrackable protection". Sincerely, Vladimir
~ Vladimir Yu. Katalov - http://www.elcomsoft.com

February 1998
...Once again, thanks for the great site. I'm a shareware author myself (CuteFTP), and I found a lot of useful info already (and I only spent a day there!). Hope my next protection scheme will be tough enough to last a few weeks, so that some of the lamers out there will get tired of waiting and actually pay for it :) Cheers, Alex Kunadze
~ Alex Kunadze - rabbit(at)txdirect(point)net

March 1998
...Ce site est tout simplement fabuleux. Il est comme un phare guidant l'individu Èpris de libertÈ au milieu de cet ocÈan politico-financier que devient Internet. Il nous encourage tous ý entretenir notre identitÈ individuelle et ý rÈsister aux sirËnes des multinationales-Ètats mercantiles. Comme on ne le dit pas assez souvent, le savoir est la seule et unique chose qui donne le vrai pouvoir, celui d'Ítre soi mÍme, indÈpendant et libre. L'accËs au savoir est un droit inaliÈnable et sa diffusion un devoir pour tout un chacun. Merci encore fravia+ pour ce site unique en son genre...
~ tamaya.wanadoo.fr: "Les sites ý visiter"

April 1998
...as a shareware author, i'm pleased to find my programs cracked. And this is why: the little .COM app cracks only work for specific versions and since i constantly put out new versions, the cracks are obsolete before anyone can ever see them. you might want to mention that in your page somewhere. Huge companies like M$ and Adobe can't put out 2 versions each week. small shareware authors can, and i do. By flooding the world with dozens of different versions, an author can keep crackers very busy. and, no i'm not putting out bug fixes, i respond to users and add features. and yes, i charge for my programs, but not much: just enough to keep my web sites alive... now if i could just kill all the serial # pages run by "StUpiD LoNeLy tEEnAgErs", my job would be much easier... ...
~ chrisdl(at)pagesz(point)net
http://www.pagesz.net/~chrisdl

May 1998
...years ago when there were people with flair and a clue, like Pengo. Now the hacking man of the hour is Kevin Mitnick, a seemingly smart man who went to jail after devoting an insane amount of effort to annoying a computer security expert about his nationality. What really impressed me though was your reality cracking section, it was hard for me to believe that you actually had Noam Chomsky essays on your site. That's what it's all about, mixing political beliefs with computer knowledge, instead of wasting your time getting "warez". Micheal Moore once talked about the potential of the Internet: that Internet was for spreading ideas and educating people, but that it was bogged down with commercial garbage. On a side note I find it amazing that your lessons explain things i assumed to be insanely technical in a clear, humble, and relatively simple way...
~ dextro(at)rocketmail(point)com
(dextro)
see also -for the same month of may 1998- another, different yet related to the above, sort of " award"

June 1998
..the knowledge that fravia provides on his pages is important not just in itself but also because it teaches people to use the wonderful power of the personal computer as a tool of liberation against the powerful forces of coercion that try to restrict and control us every day everywhere, no matter if we are Asian or American or European.
~ Jim Pannozzi (Mindspring's survey of the net - June 1998)

July 1998
...You don't know how good it felt to finally understand how ASM code, hex, and binary all fit together... how it felt to crack my first program, a web spider called WebMirror... and how it felt when I turned around and removed a CD check in a game, Fire Fight, within a half an hour.
I have gained from your pages a (somewhat) clear concept of how software protection works, and how to defeat or implement it, and for that, as I'm sure I am not alone. I can never thank you enough. Please keep your site up as long as you can, as a service to everybody.
~ Ryan Underwood (July 1998)

August 1998
... and least but not last I thank Fravia for convincing me to try the Opera Browser. I loaded the 3.5 beta version and it works wonderfully. With it I will slowly recover from the MSIEx browsers' trauma. I think also that the process of detoxication will continue and maybe, maybe, I will land finally on a non-MS platform.
~ Marek Eyal (PC Discover n.77, Jerusalem (Israel), August 1998)

September 1998
Stop wading through pages of low-level material to learn how to use the web! Fravia's pages of reverse engineering offer an amazing compilation of individual workshops that will teach you some incredibly fascinating new techniques and tricks.
~ The new web library (Norway, September 1998)

October 1998
One person's offerings to the world of hackers, crackers and phreakers (phreakers? sic!). Can you say First Amendment? Much of what you'll find is definitely in a gray area legally. But it's OK to know how to do certain things, as long as you don't actually do them.
~ The Snap Editorial Team (Snap Editors' Choice, October 1998)
A typical 'bogus' award, see the 'award' for October 1997, awarded to me by Snap as well exactly a year ago... they seem to award 'crackers' every October... Often enough the result of this kind of awards are sites with a plethora of naÔv, slow loading and mostly never seen before little banners without any interest whatoever... if you click one of them you will be plonged in a banner-clicking and windows spawning hell :-) As a matter of fact I have never found a site with many of these little private awards that was really worth something... so maybe my site isn't worth that much either...

November 1998
"...I'm just writing to say how great your site is, (you already know how great it is, i can tell... hehe) and to let you know that it has inspired me, and changed how I view the world, and the internet, for the better. I can now find almost anything I want on the internet, and soon, probably absolutely anything. I may not know how to reverse (yet) but Im starting to understand the "how, and why" of it."
~ The LateKnight™

December 1998
Fravia is doing a great job and I don't think that people will ever appreciate it enough, he has my respect.
He recently took a controversial position and there are some that believe he's betraying +ORC's ideas. I don't think so. My idea of ZEN is 'feeling the code', and this is, in my opinion, what reverse engineering is all about: achieving high level programming skills, 'feeling' the code... I don't see how anyone can object to that, certainly not the great +ORC
~ Harold Brinkhof, ASM newsletter, #7/12, december 1998

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Is reverse engineering legal?