Happy anniversary and many happy returns.

Got a bronze gift for us?

Man..............

Eight years already gone .

Is that a good thing ?

I mean, shit, as you get older, time really does click off at a much faster rate .

Remember when school vacation lasted for like 6 months.
No computers. Television didnt have kids programming 24-7.
More like 5:30 AM until 7:00 AM. No evening programming for kids.
Mom telling us to get out at 8 AM and dont come back until lunch.
Mom telling us after lunch to get out and dont be late for dinner.
Water for drinking came from a hose on the side of the house.
A snack was a piece of fruit from a tree in someones yard.
NO Air conditioning. You layed on the bed pushed up to the window waiting for a breeze.
Jumping off the bridge into a river. That same river now you would never jump into, too much pollution .

Shit, I am gettin old pretty fast. Next thing you know, I will need viagra and a walker and will remenisce about being forty .

Thanks to everyone for 8 great years

Woodmann

Here you are: A bronze cauldron, circa 700 B.C.

http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/5493/bronzexk2.jpg

We love you too Woodmann, and also all the nice and talented people who frequent this place!
(and perhaps also a humble thanks to our great ancestor Fravia would be appropriate, who's legacy we are passing on to coming generations...)

Btw everyone, multiple new, exciting and powerful additions to this magic place are coming soon, so stay tuned...

viagra, a bronze cauldron and a walker, pretty sorted heheh

Heck! I'd reminisce about being 40, but I can't remember back that far! And by the time I was almost a teenager, TV's still were not a fixture in very many homes and the TV stations went off the air at 12:00 P.M. with the National Anthem and switched to a "Test Pattern" until morning.

Thanks to all of you who make this a great place and thanks to Woodmann for keeping it on the net.

Regards,

woot i ve spent quiet a few years here lurking around and then being active

thanks to everyone who make this site possible to be on air and be a nice place to spend a few minutes daily

happy birthday and many more happy returns

i can just concat a big "Thank you all for the best reverse engineering forum ever"

And yeah time is not on our side...

OHPen

happy birthday, long life to the forum !

For the newer of us, when exactly did these forums begin to exist?

Howdy,

I think I started poking around F+ site back in 96-97?
I know it predates that.

Woodmann

Yep, I'll add my thanks here (and also my memories of only having 3 TV channels, and all of them got turned off and replaced with a test card by about 10pm).

That reminds me - I think I asked this once before, but never really got an answer.



From what are we regrouping? And why has it taken us so long to do it?

It occurs to me that I really don't know anything about the history of this site prior to a couple years ago.

I think the time is ripe to Write one history of RCE evolution in the web.

Starting perhaps from ORC++ original papers and site, the mammon site, going through the +HCU, Fravia's original site. The flame wars, the Clone wars, the Original Sin and the expulsion from Eden.

A lot of stuff has been going on since 1996 when I started looking at this sort of stuff.

Aah, brings back memories... I'll fill in some parts then, and someone else is very welcome to fill in the blanks, and perhaps use some tip-ex too.

In the golden days of the hunt for +ORC (http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/orc1.html), and in the company of some very good but not equally central sites like those of +Mammon_ (http://web.archive.org/web/19991009032328/www.eccentrica.org/Mammon/) and +Greythorne (http://home.online.no/~reopsahl/files/), there was a reverser's mecca born (in 1995), called "Fravia's pages of reverse engineering" (http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/index.htm). That place was just the best, and it attracted the interest of most of the original guys on this board today. Fravia had a great "community like" reversing site going, long before anyone heard of community sites (you really should browse through our mirror if you don't already know it by heart), in which he built an almost scary reverse engineering and anti-Microsoft cult.

The next natural step was to attach a messageboard to the site. It was a damn ugly one, on one of the first free messageboard services. The mandatory advert banners were quickly removed by some reversing and manipulation of the then-new "javascript" technology, and the board went on for quite some time, somewhat stealing focus from the main site and its great essay collection.

And since I really need to go to bed soon, I'll speed up the rest a bit for now...

Towards the end of the Fravia era, a bunch of people, including Fravia, were starting to become just a tad bit too full of themselves, and now focused more and more on what they called "reality reversing", which consisted of smoking pot and writing your own amateur psychology essays (more often than not with commie undertones, and most of them more or less worthless), and prouding themselved with saying that "simple software reversing did not interest them much anymore", because they were now such grand "reality reversers"... Well, you can all see where this is going...

One day, Fravia turned like completely gay on everyone and tried to take down and bury the site for good, in all its glory, to instead start a site solely focused on internet searching (http://www.searchlores.org / http://www.fravia.com). Because of the great interest and fan base of the original site, lots of people kept full local mirrors of their own, and these started to pop up allover the place, and there was a constant hunt for the "official one". All while Fravia was trying to have them shut down.

A guy called Tsehp in the end kept what was considered the "official last mirror", and kept updating it with the help of some of the old guys from the board. He even met Fravia in person, resisted his persuation attempts to have the site taken down, and shortly thereafter, the original messageboard (which was on another site than Fravia's old site, remember, on a free messageboard hosting place) was also shut down. Some people had already started leaking over (during the great flamewars on the old board, someone else will have to tell that tale, I have to go to bed, remember?!) to other sites, out of which one of the most central was the one ran by +Sandman (http://web.archive.org/web/20011212092943/www.idca.com/~thesandman/index2.html).

Tsehp, with the help of Woodmann and his trusty server, then (in the Lord's year of 2000) gathered ("regrouped", hint, hint) all the sheep in one place again, including Fravia's last mirror, on Woodmann's server which would from then on become the global stable home and safe haven of most of the world's greatest reverser's resources and sites, until this day.

And the rest, as they say, is history... created by all you people!

PS.
Oh, at some point Tsehp also turned like completely gay on everyone, tried to trash the server and left, but we sorted that out pretty quickly.

Howdy.

I will make naides help me write the history of all things RCE .

As for the sleepy ones comments, his perception is clouded by too much of the "chronic" .

naides, I will be sending you the outline for this essay shortly.

Woodmann

Nah, he's just "reality reversing". I sure hope he doesn't go completely gay on us. I gather that's caused a lot of problems in the past.

Seriously, though, I do appreciate the information thus far. It's considerably more than I knew before. I first got interested in reversing back in the early-to-mid 90s, which was (I gather) during the roots of the +ORC, etc. heydays. I had stumbled across +ORCs tutorials and all the good old "rainbow books" of phreaking lore. I never really got into it, though. At the time it was just a passing curiosity and I had neither the patience nor the discipline to actually learn anything. I probably still don't

Years passed without giving the subject another glance. So even though I had heard many of the names, and knew a little bit about things Back Then, there's a huge gap in my knowledge of the history. And having only barely dipped my toes in the water, I didn't really know how all these famous crackers fit together.

Sure Boss, I'll do some digging into the bowels of the internet and in my old computers/hard drives

As a primer:
http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/history.htm

It started with +Orc publishing his tutorials on Usenet circa 1995. The message was "Knowledge is now free at last", a comment on the upcoming internet revolution. The vehicle for that message just happened to be software cracking.


I've always thought "Messageboard's Regroupment" (Tsehps notion) was a cumbersome title. I don't think there was ever a "regroupment of messageboards". When the original F+ forum (defunct InsideTheWeb forum software as I remember) petered out, Sandman's Forum seemed a natural carryover for the core group. True, there were some offshoots at the time,

HCUnix - the mb is no longer but Ebenezer's / ~S~ Seeker's are still quite active for esoterica
http://www.2113.ch/

Carpathia tried to breath some life back into the scene with the RE Knowledge Mailing List
http://rekml.cjb.net/
REKML was a valiant idea that unfortunately died like so many others by lack of contributions (I did my part).

If you want to see a real horror story, this is what happens when you have an unmoderated forum and let crackers have free reign (for those who bitch about strict moderation on this forum!)
http://remb.cjb.net/
Mammon's REMB board is sadly still linked to his name and should be no reflection on this skilled reverser. This was however, for the historians, a site of the Great Flame Wars of the time... a few unexploded shells may still exist in the earliest pages..
(and who will ever forget "Protecting YOUR internet for you" )


Anyhoo...so Sandman's forum was always where it was at post-Fravia and featured several very enthusiastic communal reversing projects. You can see an example in the attachment I included in this thread:
http://www.woodmann.net/forum/showthread.php?threadid=3201

After a time, Sandman no longer wanted to host the forum, someone else took over very briefly (Amante maybe?), and then Tsehp stepped in to carry on the forum in a more modern format and host the original Fravia site as was mentioned earlier.

Fortunately for us all, Mother Woodmann, ever gracious, has provided us with stable hosting against all odds and censorship attempts for the past several years.

The scene is still alive and well, and indeed Reverse Code Engineering is now an accepted part of computing science and a much sought after skill.

As it was in 1995 the message is still the same:

"Knowledge is now free at last"

really 3.6 billion dollors were made selling a photo? i should start reality reversing then

Don't forget Kevin coming to the rescue when Fravia's site was getting DDoS'ed into oblivion.
Also, anyone know WTF happened to Carpathia? I used to be good friends with him back in the day when I used to frequent #c4n. Did he fall off the face of the planet or just change his handle?

Made me laugh out loud.

For the unknowing, F+ did not "turn gay and shut down all his sites" as someone above put it. Instead, he was threatened with dire consequences by an organisation powerful enough to buy out the USA govt. Some of the members I know of this board still work with that same organization. In return for "no legal action" against F+, he was also asked to subtly praise that company and abandon all forms of cracking knowlege disbursement as they knew F+ has a large number of followers who do as he still does. You will find F+ recommending that company now, ever so subtly, whose name may shock his old time followers as he spewed the worst poision against that company in his cracking days.

I look upon the stunted growth of the board, imagine where we would have been had that company not forced him to abandon cracking, had not scared many olden goldies into retirement, and I feel sad on this day as a reminder of what we could have been...

Have Phun

If only he had resisted them and gone "underground"...

As a side note, "turning gay" is an internet slang idiom for giving in to the pressure from others (i.e. not very "masculine".

Little known fact: this is actually IHoP, who tried to diversify from tasty flour, milk, egg and buttery oval treats into crypto hardware for VPN terminators.

LOOOOL
Resistance is futile


only thing I found is www.ihop.org - has already implanted a stable cult??

...apart talking well of a certain company (I did once here and I'm still vomiting for that), I wish to thank you for explaining these things to me (to us ). I'd like to know a bit more, as I'm pretty curious about these things. So, please join the forces and give us a nice "RCE Chronicle"

"...I'm just passionately curious"

M$ doesn't have enough money to buy the U.S. Government, only several Senators and Congressmembers, if that were their real wish and goal.

And as much as many of us around seem to "love to hate um," most of us still use their products for some parts of our personal or business internet life. Not to mention the operating system on which this response is being written.

And even with F+ no longer heavy into the reversing scene, there is no shortage at all of available versions of most popular software on the warez market and a workaround for confirming Vista's bona fides was available almost before the product went final. Some people do these things just to prove they can, some people do it to try to make money. Those who do it just for the intellectual challenge are the real progeny of F+. He always suggested that if you were going to actually "use" the product, you should pay for it.

Regards,

Actually, F+ has probably gone over to Linux:

http://fravia.com/linux.htm

Congratulations to all who have kept this board running with class and dignity. Not an easy task.

We have had some bumps, but none like the time of ORC++ and F+. I had to change my name twice to avoid a stalker that would chase me all over the place to continue a dumb argument. We now have some sharp reversers and great thinkers visit here. Doesn't seem to be as much ego going on. Congratulations again.

Regards, kugi

wow and ubuntu advocacy

well ubuntu is worth the try sleek and neat supports beryl and works well in microsoft's virtual pc after a few hiccups the only thing i hate with ubuntu'ers are the nix is good maniacs who refuse to answer queries if some one is running their os in ms vm

unisex jeans for all of the humankind

Actually, Ubuntu users in general seem to be frowned upon by the rest of the Linux community, as to them it's a "dumbed down" version of Linux that is usable without the usual configuring from the commandline and such, and we all know how elitist the Linux community is

http://www.ihop.com/

What I like about Ihop is that when they serve the food - it actually looks like the picture in the menu.

Speak for yourself; I still have a huge ego


I've seen the menu at IHOP, and what you said above is not necessarily a good thing