realicra.htm: TEXT CRACKING, exegesis and rethorical cracking

EXEGESIS
FRAVIA'S REALITY CRACKING LAB TEXT CRACKING SECTION (Created: October 1998 ~ Last update: May 1999)
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	The web is text. All images and sounds notwithstanding, the web is text. It was created in order to exchange and store texts. Email are texts, and the whole Usenet is almost exclusively text... even Perl, the web-programming language that's now all the rage, is an acronym of "Practical Extraction Report Language" and was created to extract information from text files and prepare reports. It is evident: because of the web the 'written expression' has re-acquired an importance it did seem to have in part lost during the now obsolete radio, telephone and television aera (also known as "age of the frill-morons" :-) Yes: the web is text, an ocean of text, of messages and information that we must reverse. So we need means and tools to crack all this text. But we don't have them any more. So we go back to the text-crackers, the great rethorical wizards of ancient Greece, the masters of the evangelische text-exegesis, the incredible German crackers of the 'Quellenkunde' of the beginning of this now closing century. Since we can search, we find. The old lore. Since we can reverse we will learn how to crack - in spades - the pathetical 'protection schemes' used by magazines, newspapers, politicians, any deceiving writer email spammer, advertiser enemy. We are reversers, a new race... and a very old one. Beware.

Text cracking (rethorical reversing)
history of an almost forgotten lore

An 'exegesis' is applied 'reverse engineering' work on any written text. An almost forgotten Art as I said. The best reversers of this kind where a bunch of German history professors of the late XIX and of the beginning of this century, like Georg Waitz, Harry Bresslau, Ernst Dümmler, Oswald Holder-Egger and many more... These professors had not only exceptional brains and capacities but also, for a lucky historical coincidence, almost unlimited resources at their disposal. Since Germany was young and wanted to 'prove' its historical 'right' to be one of the great european nations, the exegesis of medieval text-sources "Quellenforschung", reached highs that afterwards noone never obtained again. That's the reason most sources originally published (and 'cracked') between 1820 and 1915 are still being re-published and used nowadays (by the degenerated historians of to-day, who -mostly- don't know neither greek nor latin and tend to read (and publish) sources in their translated and non-collated versions... a truly barbarical degeneration when you think that most HIGH SCHOOL professors -not to mention the university teachers- could around 1900 read latin, greek... and often enough Sanskrit as well!) in fact, text-cracking and text-exegesis, and all rethorical lores, are sciences in DECADENCE! Yet maybe the web effect will now change this.
Alas! Stupid Germans went militarist twice and all their reversing cleverness notwithstanding all the German reversers went conquering their neighbours! The greatest text-crackers scene of this planet was almost completely destroyed! In fact all the students of the great exegesis wizards that were not killed during the first World War did die during the Second World War, and the whole 'text-crackers' scene went down with them (hence the appearence and predominance of the completely useless and 'frill oriented' french school of the "Bloch and Duby sort" in the fifties and sixties :-)
Yet not all great text-crackers disappeared... there have been some rare exceptions, the most significant of them being represented by Adolf Hofmeister, a student of the great Alexander Cartellieri, and himself last great wizard in text-cracking. Hofmeister survived in the small German university of Greifswald, and did even impart his teachings to a couple of younger students, Frithjof Sielaff being the most able one... but that is another (very interesting) story... :-)

In the reality cracking section of my site you'll already find some outstanding essays that cover, at least in part, this same argument (for instance Martine Joly's Rhetoric of advertisement, a "Marlboro Classic" Advertisement analyzed, yet they are, like most anti-advertisement essays, mostly 'visual' oriented.

Nuff said, for now: Knwoledge of the lost exegesis techniques and of rhetoric will be enough (at least I hope) to reverse any text black and blue, at least compared with to-days almost absolute ignorance of these matters (and yet I believe that our reversing techniques are something that would be really worth teaching in the schools to-day).

The Essays
Here you go... as you can imagine this all is FAR from being correctly systemathized...