This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up in a secret location with snacks to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.
First up in the news, and there’s a lot of it: we announced the Hackaday Europe 2025 workshops and a few more speakers, though the big keynote announcement is still to come. In case you missed it, KiCad 9 moved up into the pro league, and finally, we’re hiring, so come join us in the dungeon.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina didn’t get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. That’s okay, though, because nobody got it right! We’re still giving a t-shirt away to [Dakota], though, probably because Elliot has a thing for using random number generators.
Then it’s on to the hacks and such beginning with a beautiful handheld compass CNC and cyanotype prints made with resin printer’s UV light. After that, we take a look at open-source random numbers, a 3D-printed instant camera, and a couple of really cool cyberdecks. Finally, we discuss whether DOOM is doomed as the port of choice in this day and age, and kvetch about keyboards.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
[Kelly Coffield] makes intake manifolds for old Ford throttle bodies for fun, demonstrating an excellent technique for making such things in the small shop. The mould patterns are CNC machined from a solid polystyrene block, with all the necessary gates to feed the aluminium into the mould. The principle is to introduce aluminium from a large central runner into the mould structure, which feeds the gates into the mould parts. The various foam mould components are then glued with an extra brace bar at the bottom to strengthen it. Dip coating with a refractory slurry The complete structure is then sprayed with surfactant (just plain old soapy water) and dip-coated in a refractory slurry. The surfactant adjusts the coating’s surface tension, preventing bubbles from forming and ruining the surface quality produced by this critical coating step.
Once a satisfactory coating has been applied and hardened, the structure is placed inside a moulding pan fitted with a pneumatic turbine vibrator, to allow sand to be introduced. The vibrations ease the flow of sand into all the nooks and crannies, fully supporting the delicate mould structure against the weight of the metal, and gases produced as the foam burns away. A neat offset pouring cup is then added to the top of the structure and packed in with more sand to stabilise it. It’s a simple setup that can easily be replicated in any hackerspace or backyard for those motivated enough. [Kelly] is using A356 aluminium alloy, but there’s no reason this technique won’t work for other metals.
It was amusing to see [Kelly] demould by just dumping out the whole stack onto the drive and throwing the extracted casting into a snow bank after quenching. We might as well use all that free Midwest winter cooling capacity! After returning to the shop, [Kelly] would typically perform any needed adjustments, such as improving flatness in the press, while the part was in the ‘as cast temper’ condition. We’ll gloss over the admission of cutting the gates off on the table saw! After these adjustments, the part is artificially aged to a T5-like specification, to give it its final strength and machinability properties. There are plenty more videos on this process on the channel, which is well worth a look.
Now there’s a quirk to this story. No one has been able to answer a simple yet vital question: What exactly did the theme plugin do that was malicious? The official response is that “A theming extension with heavily obfuscated code and unreasonable dependencies including a utility for running child processes”. Looking at the official statements and unofficial security reviews, I can’t find confirmation that the plugins have actually been observed doing something malicious. The only concrete problem is that the plugin shipped obfuscated JavaScript. There are several incomplete statements about a problem with a sanity.io dependency that may have been compromised.
The conclusion at this point is that a thorough security review of these plugins has not been published. The Microsoft team found enough problematic elements in the plugins to trigger pulling them. But I join the chorus of voices calling on Microsoft to clearly answer the vital question: Have any users of Material Theme plugins actually been compromised?
Low-hanging Backups
NAKIVO backup has an interesting endpoint, the getImageByPath call that’s used for loading the system’s logo, and is accessible for unauthenticated users. It’s pretty simple, just taking a path to a file on the appliance filesystem, and returning the byte array for use as an image. And of course, it doesn’t check whether the requested file is actually an image. Nor is it limited to a list of allowed paths.
So hence we essentially have an arbitrary file read. It’s not entirely arbitrary, as the file is first loaded into memory before being served. So the backups themselves are likely too big to successfully exfiltrate in this way. There are still some rather interesting targets, including the system logs. But the real juicy target is the system database itself. Thankfully, the user credentials for the NAVIKO system itself seem to be properly hashed to avoid casual theft. But setting up useful backups will require all sorts of integrations, like SSH and AWS credentials. And those are stored in plain text inside the database. Whoops.
The logic here seems to be that not offering any end-to-end encrypted backup system for UK users is a better choice than claiming to offer such a system that actually contains a backdoor. That’s doubly true, as the law in question doesn’t seem to limit itself to UK users. If the UK government doesn’t back down on their extremely questionable demands, the next major step may be for Apple to pull sales from the country entirely.
Crypto Heist
We have a pair of crypto heist stories this week, with the first one being the largest in history. At a staggering $1.5 Billion, this seems like the biggest single theft of any kind to ever be successfully pulled off. And the details of how it was done are still a bit murky. The funds were stolen out of a Bybit “multisig” cold wallet. Those are clever currency stores that actually include smart contracts in the storage mechanism, requiring multiple owners to sign off on transactions.
It’s believed that this hack was pulled off by North Korean agents, through the use of very clever but simple techniques: Social engineering, and UI manipulation. In essence, a request for digital signature that claimed to do something benign, that actually unlocked the funds for theft. Some things never seem to change.
And that’s not all that’s happening with Cryptocurrency these days. It turns out that there’s another dead-simple attack that is targeting job-seeking individuals, instead of huge companies. “We may have a job for you, go to this website and run this application to apply!” Rather than a legitimate videoconferencing or interviewing application, the download is a simple backdoor. It’s used primarily to find crypto wallets and siphon the funds out.
Wallbleed
Remember Heartbleed? That’s the glitch in OpenSSL from 2014, where the TLS heartbeat implementation could trivially leak large amounts of system memory. Wallbleed is a strangely similar bug in the implementation of the Chinese Great Firewall system. One way the Great Firewall does censorship is via DNS injection. Request the DNS information for a blocked domain, and the firewall will intercept that request in real time, and return a spoofed response with a bogus IP address for the requested domain. Importantly for this discussion, that spoofing is bi-directional. You can send DNS requests to Chinese IP addresses, and get spoofed responses from the Great Firewall.
DNS request and response packets use an interesting variable length transport system, where the domain name being requested is turned into a set of length-value pairs. example.com is represented as 07example03com00. 7 bytes for the domain, then 3 bytes for the TLD, and a terminating null. Many of us are immediately wondering, what happens if that query was packed incorrectly: 07example20com00? There aren’t actually 20 bytes in the query, so what do various DNS responders do when handed such a query? Well-written DNS servers recognize that this is garbage, and just drop the packet. Some of the great firewall infrastructure did something far more interesting. It spoofs the DNS response, and performs a buffer over-read when constructing the response. Yes, leaking a few bytes of raw system memory back to the requester, a la Heartbleed.
And when we say “a few bytes”, the maximum observed leakage in a single spoofed response was 125. As you might imagine, that’s quite a bit of data. Enough data, in fact, to learn quite a bit about the Great Firewall and what sort of traffic it sees. There were also what appeared to be x86_64 pointers and Linux stack frames.
This attack was first discovered by researchers in 2021 and finally completely fixed in March 2024. In the intermediate time, those researchers used the vulnerability quite heavily to mine the Great Firewall infrastructure for data. This is an interesting ethical question. Normally it’s considered completely unacceptable to weaponize a vulnerability beyond what’s needed as a proof of concept. The Great Firewall is in some ways an adversarial device, making exploitation a bit murkier. On the other hand, vulnerabilities like this a usually disclosed in order to get them fixed. What is a researcher’s responsibility in this case, when the vulnerability is in a censorship device? It seems the Chinese authorities discovered the Wallbleed vulnerability themselves, excusing researchers from needing to fully answer this particular ethical question.
Bits and Bytes
It’s not surprising to open up an electronic device, and find an ugly glob of potting compound spread over one or several of the key chips inside. Or for some devices, the compound is ubiquitous, covering everything. [Graham Sutherland] has some thoughts on how to defeat the stuff. And while some is obvious, like using a drill press to very carefully expose a target interface, there are some really inventive ideas I would never have considered, like throwing an entire board into a pressure cooker for an hour!
How long does it take for a cyber criminal to go from initial access on an internal machine, to full access to a privileged computer? In the ReliaQuest case, it was 48 minutes. The hack was simple and clever. Start a mass spam and phishing campaign, and then pose as a helpful IT worker who could help end the carnage. All it takes is one employee to fall for the fake help desk routine, and 48 minutes.
Let’s say you wanted to pirate music from a streaming service like Deezer, but you really didn’t want your IP address or machine associated with the piracy. What would you do? Use Tor? VPNs? How about create a malicious PyPi package that does your downloading for you. That seems to be the bizarre case of automslc, a reasonably popular package that secretly downloads and scrapes from the music platform.
La Francia si sta preparando ad approvare leggi che potrebbero rivoluzionare la sicurezza online, obbligando i fornitori di servizi di telecomunicazioni a installare backdoor nelle app di messaggistica crittografata e limitando l’accesso alle risorse Internet tramite VPN. L’iniziativa ha suscitato aspre critiche da parte di Tuta (ex Tutanota) e della VPN Trust Initiative (VTI).
Il primo disegno di legge controverso è un emendamento alla legge francese sul narcotraffico, che impone ai servizi di comunicazioni criptate di fornire alle forze dell’ordine i messaggi decriptati dei sospettati entro 72 ore dalla richiesta. Il mancato rispetto degli obblighi comporterà sanzioni fino a 1,5 milioni di euro per le persone fisiche e fino al 2% del fatturato globale annuo per le aziende. Sebbene la legge non sia ancora entrata in vigore, è già stata approvata dal Senato francese e passerà all’esame dell’Assemblea nazionale.
Tuta ha chiamato i parlamentari che hanno respinto l’emendamento, sostenendo che indebolire la crittografia avrebbe creato vulnerabilità non solo per i criminali, ma anche per gli utenti comuni. L’azienda sottolinea che, anche se la backdoor viene creata nell’interesse delle forze dell’ordine, può essere utilizzata da criminali informatici e agenzie governative. Tuta ha sottolineato che tali iniziative violano le leggi dell’UE sulla protezione dei dati (GDPR) e anche gli standard tedeschi sulla sicurezza informatica.
Contemporaneamente, in Francia si sta valutando un’altra innovazione: l’obbligo per i servizi VPN di bloccare l’accesso ai siti pirata. La holding mediatica Canal+ e la Lega calcio francese (LFP) hanno lanciato un’iniziativa in tal senso, chiedendo ai provider Internet e ai servizi VPN di limitare l’accesso a determinate risorse web.
VPN Trust Initiative (VTI), che include AWS, Google, Cloudflare, Namecheap, OVH, IPVanish VPN, Ivacy VPN, NordVPN, PureVPN ed ExpressVPN, ha condannato una mossa del genere, affermando che la lotta alla pirateria non dovrebbe portare alla censura e alla violazione dei diritti degli utenti. Nella sua lettera aperta, l’organizzazione ha tracciato parallelismi tra l’iniziativa e le restrizioni imposte a Internet in altri paesi, tra cui Cina, Myanmar e Iran, sottolineando che tali misure costituiscono un precedente per la censura di massa.
La Francia non è l’unico Paese in cui il controllo sui dati Internet sta aumentando. Nel Regno Unito, il governo ha recentemente richiesto da Apple di fornire l’accesso ai backup crittografati di iCloud. In risposta, l’azienda ha spento l’opzione di crittografia end-to-end per gli utenti del Regno Unito. In Svezia è in preparazione un disegno di legge che obbligherà i messaggeri Signal e WhatsApp creare backdoor tecniche per fornire l’accesso ai messaggi crittografati.
Di recente è emersa anche la notizia che il capo dell’Europol Catherine De Bolle vuole collaborare con le principali aziende tecnologiche per ampliare la cooperazione con le forze dell’ordine sulle questioni relative alla crittografia. A suo avviso, il rifiuto di tale interazione potrebbe rappresentare una minaccia per la democrazia europea.
La Procura generale belga ha avviato un’indagine su una fuga di dati del Servizio di sicurezza dello Stato (VSSE) presumibilmente effettuata da hacker cinesi. Secondo quanto riferito, i criminali informatici hanno avuto accesso al server di posta elettronica esterno di VSSE tra il 2021 e maggio 2023, intercettando circa il 10% di tutte le e-mail inviate e ricevute dai dipendenti del dipartimento.
Il server compromesso è stato usato per comunicare con la procura, i ministeri, le forze dell’ordine e altri enti governativi. Inoltre, questo server è stato utilizzato da discussioni interne, che ha potenzialmente portato alla fuga di dati personali di dipendenti e candidati, compresi i loro curriculum e documenti di identità.
Il primo segnale dell’attacco è stato rilevato nel 2023, quando i media belgi hanno segnalato un incidente, che ha coinciso con la divulgazione di una vulnerabilità nei prodotti Barracuda. In seguito a ciò, VSSE ha smesso di utilizzare le soluzioni aziendali e ha raccomandato ai dipendenti di sostituire i documenti per ridurre il rischio di frode di identità.
Tuttavia, secondo fonti anonime, al momento non ci sono prove che i dati rubati siano apparsi sul darknet o siano stati utilizzati a fini di estorsione. Gli specialisti della sicurezza VSSE continuano a monitorare i forum underground e le piattaforme di trading alla ricerca di tracce e a potenziale fughe di dati. A peggiorare la situazione, l’attacco informatico è avvenuto in un momento in cui l’organizzazione era impegnata in un’importante campagna di assunzioni.
La VSSE ha rifiutato di rilasciare dichiarazioni, confermando solo che è stata presentata una denuncia formale in merito all’incidente. Allo stesso tempo, la Procura federale belga ha dichiarato che l’indagine è iniziata nel novembre 2023, ma è ancora troppo presto per trarre conclusioni. L’ambasciata della Cina in Belgio ha respinto le accuse, affermando che le autorità belghe non avevano fornito prove convincenti.
Si ritiene che l’attacco alla VSSE sia stato effettuato utilizzando una vulnerabilitàZero-Day nei Gateway di sicurezza della posta elettronica Barracuda (ESG). Nel 2023, gli specialisti Mandiant hanno attribuito attacchi mirati al gruppo UNC4841 che lavora per conto del governo cinese.
📣 Dal 12 al 14 marzo 2025 si svolgerà l’ottava edizione di Didacta Italia a Firenze, presso la Fortezza da Basso! Il #MIM sarà presente all’importante appuntamento dedicato alla formazione e all’innovazione scolastica con oltre 130 eventi, organizzat…
📣 Dal 12 al 14 marzo 2025 si svolgerà l’ottava edizione di Didacta Italia a Firenze, presso la Fortezza da Basso! Il #MIM sarà presente all’importante appuntamento dedicato alla formazione e all’innovazione scolastica con oltre 130 eventi, organizzat…
Ieri il Ministro Giuseppe Valditara si è recato nelle Marche per una visita istituzionale in alcune scuole del territorio e per incontrare studenti, docenti e amministratori locali.
Ieri il Ministro Giuseppe Valditara si è recato nelle Marche per una visita istituzionale in alcune scuole del territorio e per incontrare studenti, docenti e amministratori locali.
Qui tutti i dettagli ➡️ https://www.mim.gov.
Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps. The News Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of […]
Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps.
The News
Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of all backlinks in the entire network. Constellation now has a database of over 1.2 billion links, and an accompanying website with statistics to slice through. The Constellation API is now also getting integrated into multiple PDS browsers, both PDSls and atp.tools show backlinks to the ATProto records now. This puts PDS browsers more into their own specific place on the network: not a full AppView, but more than just a way to view the content of a PDS.
Bluesky PBC has put out a new proposal for ATProto, Sync 1.1. The proposed update concerns the relays, and the validation work they do. As part of the Authenticated Transfer, which ATProto is named after, relays validate every event on the firehose. This validation process currently requires a relay to store the entire repo, which can take up a lot of space. This is one of the aspects that make hosting a relay more expensive. The proposed update changes the way validation works, which allows a relay to validate the integrity of all the data going through the firehose without having to store the entire repo. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy provides an explainer thread on how this works here. This update makes it much more feasible for people to self-host relays.
Another proposal by Bluesky PBC is for moderation routing report. The new feature allows labelers to select which type of report they want to receive. A common problem that labelers currently face is that users tend to receive reports that are not relevant for their specific labeling service, which causes them unnecessary extra work, as well as getting unnecessarily exposed to awful content. The new proposed update allows labelers to opt-out of specific reporting categories. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says Bluesky PBC is currently working on implementing the feature, aiming to ship it soon.
In Other News
Bluesky has posted some new job vacancies, and they are now hiring a System Integrity Engineer, Product Designer and Senior Trust and Safety Lead. Both the System Integrity Engineer and Trust and Safety Lead indicate that Bluesky is expanding their Trust and Safety work: both of these jobs are newly created positions, with the engineering position explicitly focused on moderation systems and regulatory compliance.
Some podcasting news: two podcasting apps, Transistor and TrueFans, both added support for displaying Bluesky comments on the podcast episode page. TrueFans also supports fediverse comments, so that a podcast episode page can display comments and reactions from both networks.
Bluesky engineer Jaz wrote an article about ‘lossy’ timelines. The summary is that to maintain performance, the home timelines of accounts that follow more than 4k accounts will not always see all posts on the timeline.
Upcoming ATProto short-form video platform Spark shared their outline on some of the limits they’ll set. Spark aims to allow videos of 300 MB or 3 minutes long (compared to Bluesky’s 50MB or 1 minute), and 12 files for image posts (5MB each). This is part of the reason why Spark is not using Bluesky’s lexicon, instead developing their own. Setting these limits higher will also require Sparks to provide their own PDSes, as the file size limit is set by the Bluesky PDS. Hosting video is expensive, and it is not yet clear how Spark will finance this.
A short tutorial on how to publish lexicon verification. The first verified lexicons are now starting to show up on lexidex.
Roomy has posted a deep dive on their tech stack, how they are combining ATProto and Automerge to build public chatrooms.
Web browser Opera adds Bluesky integration, allowing you to more easily doom scroll in the sidebar of the browser.
Bluesky video client Skylight is now available in beta on Android, after Skylight had trouble with Google to get the Android beta approved.
Some events: Feed builder Graze will hold a meetup in New York this Friday the 28th, and at SXSW (March 10th, Austin) there will be Bluesky meetup.
The Links
An interview with Game Industry Labeler developer Trazy on how builds a community of thousands of game devopers on Bluesky.
A guide (in Japanese) on how to upload videos using Bluesky API (XRPC)
An interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at Knight Media Forum.
A podcast interview with the developer of the ATProto art platform Pinksea
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all the articles of this week, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
Il presidente statunitense ha trattato con grande sufficienza quello ucraino, accusandolo di voler rischiare una Terza guerra mondiale, tra le altre cose
Ricordo quella mattina di ottobre del 1998 a Milano, all'altezza di viale Bligny, quando io e il Pierre fermi al semaforo, veniamo avvicinati da un'auto con sopra Leone e due giovani ragazze. Guarda il nostro cabriolet bianco, con la capote aperta, si alza in piedi e dice:"Permettete che ci piscio dentro?"
Magari un'altra volta.
"Trenta chili" Leone di Lernia e il Complesso l'Universo (1968)
chissà come mai zelensky ce l'ha così tanto con putin... neppure lo avesse invaso... ha fatto solo un'operazione speciale. per trump invece non era neppure una questione di pace tra ucraina e russia, ma solo affari. le famose "terre rare". qualcuno dica a trump che l'ucraina ha si minerali di valore ma non terre rare. e comunque non così tante come pensa lui. se non fosse così tragica ci sarebbe da ridere sia di trump che di putin. i grandi perculatori. il secondo convinto di essere stato aggredito dalla nato, il primo interessato ad affari con un popolo martoriato. ucraina come fascia di gaza a quanto pare. e pensare che prima dell'invasione ucraina la nato era data per finita... un retaggio del passato. poi creduta rinata, almeno da un paio di paesi confinanti con la russia. e con trump di nuovo morta. tutto cambia. eternamente. se la nato non esiste più, possiamo tornare tutti a casa, grande putin? e ognuno a sfondarsi di spese militari per il prossimo futuro e fregandosene del cambiamenti climatico... questi sono i saggi leader dell'epoca moderrna? quelli "concreti"? se non altro sia putin che trump amano il petrolio. chissà se ci fanno pure bagni di salute dentro. altro che inseguire orsi: le paludi di petrolio. c'è la lotta nel fango, e c'è la lotta nel petrolio.
(Stuart Kauffman "Reinventare il sacro" Codice Edizioni)
Qui sulla Terra, una buona metà di noi crede in un Dio creatore. Qualche altro miliardo crede in un Dio abramitico soprannaturale, e alcuni altri negli antichi dei indù. Tradizioni di saggezza, come il buddismo, sono spesso senza Dio. Circa un miliardo di persone è laico, ma privo di spiritualità e semplice consumatore materialista in una società laica. Se c'è qualcosa a cui noi laici teniamo è l'umanesimo. Ma l'umanesimo, in un'accezione ristretta, è troppo esile per nutrirci come agenti umani nel vasto universo che in parte co-creiamo. Abbiamo bisogno, credo, di un dominio per la nostra vita, ampio come la realtà. Se la metà di noi crede in un Dio soprannaturale, la scienza non confuterà quella fede. Abbiamo bisogno di un luogo per la nostra spiritualità, e un Dio creatore è uno di quei luoghi. Siamo noi, sostengo, ad aver inventato Dio, il più potente dei nostri simboli. E' una nostra scelta la saggezza con cui usare il nostro simbolo per orientare la nostra vita e la nostra civiltà. Credo che possiamo reinventare il sacro. Possiamo inventare un'etica globale in uno spazio condiviso, uno spazio sicuro per noi tutti, dove Dio va inteso come creatività naturale nell'universo.
questa cosa non ha alcun senso... considerando che il costo di una polizza si bassa sulla statistica di quanto costa un evento per l'assicurato e quale sia la probabilità che un evento generico si realizzi, in uno specifico arco di tempo. ora sappiamo che l'incidenza di questo tipo di eventi, diventato "frequente" negli ultimi anni, e pure destinato a salire nell'arco dei prossimi anni, facciamo qualche calcolo
opzione 1) un'assicurazione che mettiamo debba "contabilizzare il rischio" di dover rimborsare il 25% degli assicurati entro i prossimi 2-3 anni, dovrò far pagare un premio che è l'ammontare dei danni programmati per i prossimi anni + un guadagno. e in questo caso il costo dell'assicurazione sarà molto salato per le imprese. alcune potrebbero dover chiudere per l'impossibilità di pagare. quale azienda può assumersi il rischio statistico di perdere l'intera struttura ogni 2-3 anni?
opzione 2) il rischio è così elevato che nessuna assicurazione accetterà di stipulare polizze del genere, perché anti-economiche. perché eventi di questo genere sono diventati la norma e non più l'eccezione.
per capire il problema basti pensare al fatto che sono già sparite le polizze di protezione cristalli sulle auto, a causo della maggior incidenza statistica di questo genere di danno.
opzione 3) magari per legge le aziende assicurative saranno costrette a offrire le polizze a prezzi fattibili, e in questo caso alla prima calamità assisteremo al fallimento dell'assicurazione e quindi a nessun pagamento...
il fatto che secondo l'ottica di qualcuno le assicurazioni sono ladre ed hanno tanti soldi, non significa che offrire una garanzia del genere sia comunque fattibile, di fronte al futuro che ci attende poi. e neppure pare che il mondo voglia davvero preoccuparsi dei cambiamenti climatici... ditelo a cina, brasile, india, usa e urss....
a chiunque scaricherai la patata bollente alla fine, non sarà in grado di pagare. che sia l'azienda, un'assicurazione, o lo stato. e detti questi 3 non mi viene in mente nessun altro che possa pagare.
Polizze catastrofali, è stato pubblicato in Gazzetta Ufficiale del 27 febbraio il decreto attuativo. Confermata la scadenza del 31 marzo 2025 per le imprese. Assicurazioni già in essere da adeguare
Occhi puntati su Londra questa domenica per il vertice sulla Difesa europea indetto dal primo ministro britannico, Keir Starmer, al rientro dal suo incontro con Donald Trump alla Casa Bianca. Invitati a partecipare non solo istituzioni e Paesi membri dell’Ue, ma anche Norvegia, Turchia e vertici
Nel suo film del 2007 “La giusta distanza”, Carlo Mazzacurati narra la vicenda di un giovane apprendista giornalista, che non riesce, in merito ad un fatto di cronaca, a mantenere la “giusta distanza” dai fatti, come gli ha suggerito il suo mentore. Ovvero non riesce ad approfondire abbastanza quel che accade per averne una visione imparziale, il più possibile corretta e scevra da opinioni ed idee personali: quello che, nella teoria, ogni giornalista dovrebbe tendere a fare nel suo mestiere.
In Italia può essere portato ad esempio di come questo modo di operare sia, nei fatti, ignorato del tutto o quasi. Da parte di molte testate giornalistiche e di TG d'ogni canale è è un muoversi nelle direzioni più disparate: dapprima per rimanere “sul pezzo” e, passata la fase di picco a livello di notizia, per estendere all'infinito una serie di tematiche, perlopiù allarmiste e con un alto tasso di sensazionalismo, fino a coprire intere giornate di trasmissione.
E' anche un po' il limite, per esempio, dei canali “All News”, dove per ventiquattro ore al giorno si trasmette ogni sorta di dettaglio, di accadimento, di vocio per coprire la giornata intera. Reiterando all'infinito le stesse cose (non può accadere qualcosa di clamoroso ogni ora), si finisce con il “caricare” la notizia fino allo spasimo, spesso inserendo note di colore che rendono la narrazione volutamente altisonante, pervasiva, angosciante. Una estremizzazione indotta per mantenere attento lo spettatore.
Chiaramente è una maniera d'operare affatto corretta e per quanto giornalisti ed opinionisti lo neghino, appare abbastanza chiaro che è un mare in cui a loro piace nuotare. Possiamo comprendere che sia più semplice fare così che mantenere quella distanza di cui sopra: si rischia, magari, la noia o una maniera troppo blanda di porgere le notizie e molte persone amano, inconsciamente o meno, il clamore e la chiacchiera, a discapito di coloro che, invece, vorrebbero leggere o sentire semplicemente ciò che è successo, senza fronzoli.
D'altro canto ognuno può essere un amplificatore dei fatti: basta un account su “Facebook” o su “X” dove riprendere e commentare ogni cosa venga detta, magari distorcendo ulteriormente le cose, caricandole con opinioni personali (cui si ha diritto) e facendo rimbalzare tutto ovunque. Una sorta di cerchio infinito in cui la sconfitta è l'informazione di qualità, quella cui dovrebbero sempre ambire tutti. Sarebbe un freno per un mondo già sovraccarico di input, dove siamo “bombardati” senza sosta, senza tregua di cose che ci sentiamo obbligati a seguire.
Un corto circuito permanente d'attenzione e di sovraccarico mediatico. E come ogni cosa portata all'eccesso, è un danno. Cui, temo, non si possa più porre rimedio, se non con la volontà personale di distaccarsi da questa narrazione sbilanciata, reinserendo nel proprio modo di informarsi una quanto mai necessaria dose di distacco e di ragionamento. Cose difficili da fare, faticose, ma non impossibili.
Gli scritti sono tutelati da “Creative Commons” (qui)
Tutte le opinioni qui riportate sono da considerarsi personali. Per eventuali problemi riscontrati con i testi, si prega di scrivere a: corubomatt@gmail.com
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Enormi manifestazioni in Grecia nel giorno dello sciopero generale proclamato contro il governo, accusato di aver insabbiato le indagini contro i responsabili del disastro ferroviario di Tempes L'articolo GRECIA: sciopero generale e manifestazioni oceaniche contro
Durante l’audizione di conferma davanti alla Commissione per i servizi armati del Senato Usa, John Phelan, indicato da Donald Trump come prossimo segretario alla Marina (SecNav), ha esposto quelle che saranno le sue priorità come nuovo capo della US Navy e del Corpo dei Marine. Ridurre i
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale Nessun inciucio tra Partito Democratico e Fratelli d’Italia e nessuna crociata contro Elon Musk né tantomeno pregiudizi verso il servizio Starlink di SpaceX ma solo un’attenzione alla salvaguardia della sicurezza nazionale e della capacità
8 marzo 2025, dalle ore 10:00 alle ore 18:00 presso l’Aula Malagodi della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Introduce Lucetta Scaraffia Contro la strumentalizzazione del diritto, di Silvia Niccolai Maternità fra parto, aborto e gravidanza per altri, di Adriana Cavarero Le difficili alleanze tra i femminismi contemporanei, di Olivia
“Today’s algorithm showed me around 70 murders, 100+ accidents, and around 115 violence videos, is anyone on Instagram noticing it?”#Instagram #ContentModeration
Intervista Katana Koala Kiwi - Katana Koala Kiwi: scopri il loro EP di debutto "Per farmi coraggio mi sono buttato dal piano terra", una fusione di suoni freschi e dirompenti! - Katana Koala Kiwi
Swedbank rifiuta la trasparenza nel calcolo automatico degli interessi La banca svedese Swedbank sostiene falsamente che la logica alla base del calcolo automatico dei tassi di interesse è un "segreto commerciale" mickey27 February 2025
@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo Sanzioni commerciali, dazi e tagli già applicati contro Teheran da anni non sono riusciti a spingere la Repubblica Islamica a rivedere la propria strategia politica e militare L'articolo Trump aumenta la pressione su Teheran. L’Iran prova a resistere proviene da Pagine Esteri.
Dopo un lungo ritardo dovuto alle difficoltà nei test, l’Esercito degli Stati Uniti prevede di fornire un sistema d’arma ipersonico a lungo raggio alla prima unità entro la fine dell’anno fiscale 2025, secondo quanto dichiarato a Defense News da funzionario del Pentagono. Una data che, comunque, rimane ben lontana dall’obiettivo
Nonostante (e forse a maggior ragione) le manovre diplomatiche in corso tra Stati Uniti e Russia, Mosca non accenna a ridurre la pressione sul fronte ucraino, gettando altri soldati nordcoreani nella mischia. Secondo l’Intelligence sudcoreana, Pyongyang avrebbe inviato altre unità, almeno un migliaio,
I am selling a Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), used three times in total. Available for shipment anywhere in the EEA, in person delivery in Western Liguria and South Piedmont, Italy, and Côte d’Azur in France. Negotiable price.
Price: 150€ – This item is available on FediMercatino.it
Please reply with a direct/private message to the account that posted this, or to @Tommi 🤯.
Vendo una Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), usata in totale tre volte. Disponibile per spedizione ovunque nell’EEA, oppure consegna di persona nella Liguria di ponente e sud Piemonte, in Italia, e Costa Azzurra in Francia. Prezzo trattabile.
Prezzo: 150€ – Questo è un articolo disponibile su FediMercatino.it
Si prega di rispondere con un messaggio diretto/privato al promotore dell’annuncio, o a @Tommi 🤯.
I am selling a Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), used three times in total. Available for shipment anywhere in the EEA, in person delivery in Western Liguria and South Piedmont, Italy, and Côte d’Azur in France. Negotiable price.
Vendo una Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), usata in totale tre volte. Disponibile per spedizione ovunque nell’EEA, oppure consegna di persona nella Liguria di ponente e sud Piemonte, in Italia, e Costa Azzurra in Francia. Prezzo trattabile.
Price: 150 € :: Questo è un articolo disponibile su FediMercatino.it
Si prega di rispondere con un messaggio diretto/privato al promotore dell'annuncio.
Mappa geografica dell’Europa Riguardo le ultime vicende accadute in questi giorni in Europa e altre parti del mondo, urge una breve riflessione ma è una riflessione nuda e cruda. 1) Il fatto …
Ho comprato una macchina ibrida, benzina + elettrico. La potenza riportata sul libretto di circolazione è 75 KW, corrispondente a quella del motore termico, quella del motore elettrico non è stata considerata.
Sorry (REALLY, SINCERELY SORRY) for the Bibas children. I only show here one of the last victims of the #genocide #israel is committing. She was 2 months old. Her name is Sham Youssef Al-Shambar. She is the 18000th victim. (But we all know that by saying 18 thousand we are underestimating the real number of Palestinian children killed by israel).
@Privacy Pride Il post completo di Christian Bernieri è sul suo blog: garantepiracy.it/blog/il-molis… Fuori dal mondo Il Molise esiste, eccome se esiste, ma forse pensa di essere in un universo parallelo dove, a discapito dei Molisani, non si applica il GDPR. Si può vivere senza GDPR? Tecnicamente si, si sopravvive, ma con molte complicazioni. Se mi capitasse di…
I am selling a Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), used three times in total. Available for shipment anywhere in the EEA, in person delivery in Western Liguria and South Piedmont, Italy, and Côte d’Azur in France. Negotiable price.
Price: 150€ – This item is available on FediMercatino.it
Please reply with a direct/private message to the account that posted this, or to @Tommi 🤯.
Vendo una Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), usata in totale tre volte. Disponibile per spedizione ovunque nell’EEA, oppure consegna di persona nella Liguria di ponente e sud Piemonte, in Italia, e Costa Azzurra in Francia. Prezzo trattabile.
Prezzo: 150€ – Questo è un articolo disponibile su FediMercatino.it
Si prega di rispondere con un messaggio diretto/privato al promotore dell’annuncio, o a @Tommi 🤯.
I am selling a Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), used three times in total. Available for shipment anywhere in the EEA, in person delivery in Western Liguria and South Piedmont, Italy, and Côte d’Azur in France. Negotiable price.
Vendo una Canon Pixma TS9150 series (specs), usata in totale tre volte. Disponibile per spedizione ovunque nell’EEA, oppure consegna di persona nella Liguria di ponente e sud Piemonte, in Italia, e Costa Azzurra in Francia. Prezzo trattabile.
Price: 150 € :: Questo è un articolo disponibile su FediMercatino.it
Si prega di rispondere con un messaggio diretto/privato al promotore dell'annuncio.
Bluesky has deleted the most viral post reporting on an internal government protest agains the President of the United States and the world's richest man.
Bluesky has deleted the most viral post reporting on an internal government protest agains the President of the United States and the worldx27;s richest man.#Bluesky #ElonMusk
Bluesky has deleted the most viral post reporting on an internal government protest agains the President of the United States and the world's richest man.
da cosa si vede che trump è un cretino? l'ucraina non ha terre rare e poi ha chiesto 500 miliardi quando la produzione mondiale di terre rare è di 15 miliardi l'anno. anche l'idea di lasciare alla russia le risorse (non terre rare), se è quelle a cui si riferisce, che intende chiedere poi all'ucriana denota un intelletto superiore.
Il presidente americano vuole mettere le mani sui minerali di Kiev. C'è solo un problema: non è detto che l'Ucraina disponga davvero delle risorse che cerca
from: Jihad : the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia by: Ahmed Rashid
2 Conquerors and Saints: The Past as Present
The ethnic, political, and religious factions now vying for control in Central Asia have a history almost as old as the Central Asian civilizations themselves. Since around 500 B.C., when Darius I added the region known as Transoxiana (present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) to the Persian Empire, to the 1920s, when Stalin forcefully divided the region into the five socialist republics that correspond to the current independent republics, Central Asia has been a center for war and empire, art and culture, religion and commerce. Much of the reason for Central Asia's rich history is geographical: its huge landmass lies at the heart of the Eurasian continent. In ancient times it was considered the center of the world, linking China with Europe by means of the famous Silk Route. In reality this consisted of several routes, forged to allow merchants to carry goods by camel caravan across the two continents. But the travelers transported more than silk or spices; they also spread new technologies—such as papermaking, gunpowder, and silk weaving— new ideas, and new religions. The religion of the ancient Greeks, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism, Manichaeanism, and most of the major ideas of Islam have at one time or another found a home in Central Asia. It is the prevalence of the various ideas on Islam, in particular, and how they have been received by the various rulers of the Central Asian landmass, that are essential to an understanding of the conflicts that threaten the region today.
The Importance of Geography
Central Asia's greatest strength in the past— and its greatest problem today— is that it is landlocked, bordering Iran and Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, and Russia to the north and west. The vast Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountain ranges in the south, and the Tian Shan Mountains in the -est along the border with China. There are no clear geographical boundaries in the. north, where the Kazakh steppe merges into Siberia. Central Asia was once known as "the land between the two rivers'' for the two major rivers, the Amu Darya (Oxus) and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes), that bounded much of its territory before emptying into the Aral Sea. These two rivers have created formidable geographical, cultural, and political boundaries that separated Central Asia from the rest of the world even as the Silk Route connected it. The Amu Darya, for example, divided the nomadic Turkic and Mongol empires in Central Asia from the Persian Empire to the south, and helped act as a buffer— along with an independent Afghanistan— between the British Empire in India and tsarist Russia. Recently it has marked the border between Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Central Asia. The Syr Darya has protected Central Asian kingdoms from periodic invasions from Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Rivers are not the only natural boundaries. Central Asia lies at the crossroads of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Pamir Mountains, which cover 93 percent of today's Tajikistan; the Tian Shan Mountains, stretching to the east and north of the Pamirs; the Himalayas to the southeast; and the Hindu Kush to the south. The legendary traveler Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs in 1273 on his way to China, dubbing the range the Roof of the World. "Ascending mountain after mountain, you at length arrive at a point, where you might suppose the surrounding summits to be the highest lands in the world. ... So great is the height of the mountains, that no birds are to be seen near their summits. Here there live a tribe of savage, ill disposed and idolatrous people, who subsist upon the animals they can destroy and clothe themselves with the skins," wrote Polo in his memoirs. In the center of this vast, magnificent landscape of mountains and steppe are two of the largest deserts in the world. In the south, covering much of Turkmenistan, is the Kara-Kum (black sands) Desert: more than 135,000 square miles where rain falls approximately once a decade. To the north, in Uzbekistan, lies the Kyzyl Kum (red sands) Desert. But between these bleak wastes lush, well-irrigated valleys provide oases around which settlements and cities have grown, each oasis a self-contained economic community whose citizens traded with the local nomads and caravans that passed through. The harsh, sparsely populated landscape made Central Asia ripe for conquest but difficult to rule: empires rose and fell periodically throughout its history. The geographical face of Central Asia remained largely untouched until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the region became part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russians and later the Soviets changed the landscape, building massive irrigation networks flowing from huge reservoirs to support cotton agriculture between the Amu and Syr Darya rivers. Although in the process they created irretrievable environmental damage and pollution that have eventually resulted in acute water shortages, the drying up of lakes and rivers, and further desertification, the water routes were for many years essential sources of agriculture and food. Today those irrigation networks lie broken, hostage to the political battles that divide the region. Central Asia currently comprises five independent republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, whose fiercely disputed boundaries were drawn by Stalin as part of his divide-and-rule campaign. Its landmass of 1,542,200 square miles hosts a population of just 52 million people, representing more than one hundred ethnic groups, from the predominant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks to Germans, Koreans, and Tibetans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks, who make up 72 percent of Uzbekistan's 22 million people as well as substantial minorities in all the other Central Asian republics. Before the breakup of the Soyiet Union, there were also some 10 million Russians, comprising one-fifth of the population, many the result of forced relocation by Stalin, as another means of weakening the power of the region's ethnic groups. A large number of these Russians have migrated to Russia since 1991. But the heart of Central Asia has always been the Fergana Valley. Just two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, the fertile valley has for centuries been the home for the largest concentration of people. Today it has 10 million inhabitants, 20 percent of the total population of Central Asia. The emperor Babur, who conquered Afghanistan and founded the Mogul Empire in India in the fifteenth century, was born in the Fergana Valley, describing it in his memoirs as the closest place to Paradise on earth. From his splendid palaces in Delhi, Babur would recall the 140 varieties of grapes and watermelons produced in Fergana. Valley horses were prized as cavalry mounts by nomadic tribes and empire builders as far away as China. More than crops and livestock flourished in the Fergana Valley. Fergana has also traditionally been the center of Central Asia's political and cultural Islam, producing saints, scholars, mystics, and warriors whose knowledge and learning spread across the Muslim world. The bordering city of Osh, today the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan, was a seat of Islamic learning in the tenth century. Legend has it that the large mountain in the center of the town was blessed by King Solomon; it still bears the name Takht-i-Sulaiman (Seat of Solomon) and was long a site of Muslim pilgrimage. To the west lie the ancient Muslim capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. The 360 mosques and 113 madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) of medieval Bukhara produced scholars who spread their faith throughout Russia, China, South Asia, and the Middle East. In the words of a medieval proverb: "The sun does not shine on Bukhara, it is Bukhara that shines on the sun." Even after Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in 1868 there were still 100 madrassahs in Bukhara, with some 10,000 students.
History of Conquest
The history of Central Asia is a tale of conquest, of Mongol "hordes" and Arab holy warriors who swept across its steppes and crossed its mountains and, for a time, enfolded it within the largest empires in the world. Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan: at one time each of these conquerors added the territories of Central Asia to his vast empire, founding dynasties that survived for centuries— until the next invader arrived. Early Central Asian history is dominated by the rivalry between the Persians to the south and the Turkic tribes to the north, who vied for control of the rich oasis cities. The Persian Empire under Darius I added Transoxiana to its territory around 500 B.C. but the Persians were ousted for a time by Turkic nomadic invasions from Siberia and Mongolia. These tribes had originally (beginning in about 1000 B.C.) inhabited the Alatau Mountains in eastern Central Asia. (The Chinese began using the word Tur or Turkic to identify all the nomadic tribes who posed a threat to their empire— the ancient origins of the word Turkistan [home of the Turks], used even today to identify Central Asia.) The resurgent Persians next fell victim to Alexander the Great, who conquered Bactria and Sogdiana (ancient Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan) between 329 and 327 B.C., founding the modern-day city of Khujand. Alexander consolidated his control by urging his men to marry local women; he himself married a Sogdian princess, Roxana. Alexander's Greco-Sogdian heirs created the Bactrian Empire, which governed a large part of Central Asia and Afghanistan between 300 and 140 B.C. The western region of Central Asia (presentday Turkmenistan) was ruled by the Parthians, a tribal dynasty based on the Saka tribes, whose empire lasted until A.D. 226, when they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. Meanwhile, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century B.C. by successive waves of Sakas, who in time were driven out by another tribal group of nomads from the Gobi Desert: the Hsiung-nu, the forefathers of the Mongols. The Hsiung-nu had spread west after defeating the Uighurs, another tribal confederation who at that time ruled present-day Xinjiang Province and western China. Continuing their westward march across Central Asia, the Huns, as they were now called, reached the Volga River by a.d. 400. Their empire— the first nomadic Mongol empire— now stretched from Korea to the Volga. In the fifth century the Huns invaded Europe under their chief Attila and marched on Rome. As the Huns moved westwards the vacuum in eastern Central Asia was once again filled by invading Turkic tribes, who continued their incursions for several centuries. These nomadic invasions from Mongolia and western China have left behind few traces of their empires or culture, and little is known about the political system they erected to rule their vast landmass. Invariably, they would arrive to conquer and then move on eastwards whilst other tribes arrived to take their place. One nomadic empire did leave some impressive traces: the Kushan Empire, which dates from the first and second centuries A.D. and also included northern India, Iran, and present-day Xinjiang Province in China. In the second century the great Kushan king Kanishka became a patron of the Mahayana school of Buddhism, which was the first to humanize the figure of Buddha. (Previously Buddha had been depicted only by symbols, such as the prayer wheel.) Massive and beautiful stylized Kushan Buddha statues have been unearthed in archaeological digs in the twentieth century in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is also noteworthy that in keeping with the religious tolerance that has always characterized Central Asia, the Kushans allowed Zoroastrianism and Hinduism to flourish alongside Buddhism. For the first several centuries A.D., then, various groups contended over Central Asia: Huns, Sassanians, Turks, and Chinese, who invaded the Fergana Valley. But the next important series of incursions began around 650, when the Arabs came, bringing with them the new faith of Islam. During the next hundred years they sent invading forces into Transoxiana, capturing Bukhara and Samarkand. In 751 an Arab army defeated a Chinese army at Talas, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, decisively ending Chinese ambitions and establishing Islam in Central Asia, although the Arabs themselves did not remain to found substantial kingdoms in the region. Independent Muslim kingdoms sprang up in the oasis cities. The most significant of these was the empire of the Persian Samanids (874-999), who made their capital at Bukhara. With a well-organized bureaucracy and army the Samanids regulated and expanded the Silk Route, spreading the Persian language and making Bukhara a trade, transport, and cultural center of the Islamic world. Physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians like Al Biruni, and poets such as Firdausi ensured that the Samanid court would leave an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture, an importance that would not be eroded in Central Asia for centuries. The Samanid Empire came to an end with the arrival of a new wave of Turkic tribes. The Ghaznavids (based in Ghazni, Afghanistan) took over Khurasand, the Qarakhanids captured Bukhara, and later the Seljuks arrived to defeat them and conquer Central Asia and Turkey. By 1055 the Seljuk chief Turhril was standing outside the gates of Baghdad. For the next two hundred years the Seljuks ruled the area from the Pamir Mountains and the borders of China to Iraq, uniting Central Asia with the Persian and Arab worlds for the first time under Turkic hegemony. The Mongol hordes (ordas) were the next to sweep through the region. In 1218 the Seljuks had executed an envoy of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and murdered 450 merchants who had been trading with the Mongols. The infuriated Mongols set out to conquer the Seljuks, and historians have subsequently blamed Seljuk high-handedness for the Mongol onslaught that followed. Under Genghis Khan the Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing thirty thousand people. Standing before a pile of heads in Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, "You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God. If you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you." The Mongols continued eastwards, adding Russia and parts of Eastern Europe to their empire. Then, having conquered this vast area, they settled down to exploit it. They developed the Silk Route, which had broken down during the incessant invasions, building resthouses along the way and instituting a postal service. Under the Mongols it was possible for caravans to travel in safety from Istanbul to present-day Beijing. For the first time since the conquests of Alexander the Great, Europe was linked with Asia. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided the region into two khanates: Transoxiana in the west and Turkistan in the east. The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to leave the most significant cultural influence in the region. Timur (Tamerlane), who did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old, created the first indigenous empire in Central Asia. Timur was a Barlas Turk who had been born near Samarkand, and he made the city his capital in 1369. After he had conquered Central Asia, he added India, Persia, Arabia, and parts of Russia to his empire. Samarkand was already one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of 150,000, and under Timur it became one of the architectural marvels of the world as well, for Timur brought in artisans and architects from all the conquered regions. By now, after almost four hundred years of Turkic rule, the region had become established as the center for Turkic influence in Central Asia and of resistance to Persian cultural and political domination. Timur even replaced Persian with the Jagatai dialect of Turkish as the court language. The Shaybani Uzbeks, who traced their genealogy back to Uzbek Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, created the last of the great nomadic empires in Central Asia. In 1500 they defeated the Timurids (descendants of Timur) and set up their capital in Bukhara. Under Shaybani rule Turkic (Uzbek) language and literature flourished. The great Uzbek poet Mir Alisher Navai (1441-1501) created the first Turkic script, which replaced Persian. After the sixteenth century, weakened by the decline of the Silk Route as sea routes opened linking Europe to Africa and India, the Shaybani Empire began to erode. Large empires and strong rulers were no longer needed to ensure the safety of the Silk Route, whilst the dramatic loss of income from the traffic in trade meant that rulers were no longer capable of keeping large standing armies and expanding their kingdoms. In addition, the conservative ulema (Islamic scholars, who had enormous influence over daily life) banned innovations in education and science, further marginalizing Central Asia. The Shaybani Empire gradually degenerated into a collection of small, squabbling, city-based fiefdoms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these emerged as three separate but weak khanates— Khiva, Kokand, and Bukhara — in which the khans (rulers) later established dynasties: the Kungrad in Khiva, the Mangyt in Bukhara, and the Ming in Kokand. The impoverished khans survived by the slave trade and the imposition of exorbitant taxes on the population. It was inevitable that the tsars, seeking to expand their Russian empire, should eventually look to Central Asia. By 1650 the Russians had annexed Siberia and reached the Pacific Ocean. In the next two centuries Russia moved to conquer the Caucasus and Central Asia. Peter the Great invaded the Kazakh steppe in 1715 and began building Russian forts, the first at Omsk in 1716. By 1750 all the Kazakh khans, who saw the Russians as their best security against the marauding Uzbeks, had signed treaties with Moscow. The Russian expansion was fueled by the empire's vast military bureaucratic apparatus, which had subdued the Caucasus and was now without a role even as the tsars eyed the potential resources of Central Asia: minerals and cotton. When the American Civil War (1861-65) cut off vital cotton supplies to Russian factories, the urge to conquer Central Asia was irresistible. At the same time Russia was watching with apprehension the steady expansion of the British Empire in India from Bengal towards Afghanistan. This was the era of the Great Game —the vast power struggle between Russia and Great Britain for control of Asia that used Central Asia and Afghanistan as pawns in their efforts to outmaneuver each other, building influence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was established as buffer between the two empires of Russia and Britain. In the brief period between and 1876, Russian armies captured Tashkent and much of modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, although the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan remained open, and tribal leaders and bandits frequently took refuge in one another's territories— a tradition that is being revived today amongst the Islamic extremists of Central Asia and the Taliban. The Russians established the province of Turkestan, whose capital was Tashkent and which was ruled by a governor general appointed by Moscow. They left the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva as autonomous political units, dependent on Russia. Whilst the settled regions were easily conquered, the nomadic tribes continued to resist for several decades, and periodic revolts broke out in the Fergana Valley. In 1885 Russian troops crushed a revolt in the valley towns of Osh, Margilan, and Andijan led by a Sun Dervish, Khan Tura. The most serious threat to Russian rule arose in May 1898, when twenty-two Russian soldiers were killed in Andijan by Islamic rebels. The revolt spread to other towns before Russian troops arrived and brutally quashed the rebellion. As a way of controlling the region, the Russians began resettling Central Asia with ethnic Russians and Cossacks and turning the rest of the land over to cotton production; in 1891 alone more than a million Russian and Cossack farmers were settled on Kazakh lands adjoining Siberia. The Russians developed large cotton plantations by means of vast irrigation projects. New industries manned by Russian workers were also introduced, and Central Asia was linked with Russia through a railway network that for the first time brought the Russian Empire up to the borders of Afghanistan, Iran, China, and British India. Tsarist rule ended in a holocaust of suffering for the peoples of Central Asia. In 1916, with the region facing a massive famine, a revolt broke out after Moscow tried to draft Central Asians to fight for the tsarist army in World War I. The government also increased taxes and forcefully appropriated wheat from the region. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads, who saw no reason why they should fight in Europe for the tsar, were the first to rebel, and the revolt soon spread across Central Asia. But as with previous rebellions, tsarist troops brutally suppressed it, killing tens of thousands of people in the process. In the Tian Shan Mountains a Cossack army carried out reprisals against the Kyrgyz, slaughtering flocks, burning down villages, and forcing huge numbers of Kyrgyz to flee across the border into Chinese Turkestan. Even today the Kyrgyz identify the 1916-17 repression as the worst period in their history, in which as much as a quarter of the Kyrgyz population was slaughtered or forced to flee. But when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Central Asia had no desire to become part of the new Soviet Union. Central Asians resisted Sovietization more fiercely than most other regions, with the Muslim Basmachis ("bandits"), as the Bolsheviks termed them, leading the struggle. By 1929, however, when the Basmachis were finally defeated, the map of Central Asia had been forcibly redrawn into five soviet republics, and the centuries of wars for control of the region seemed to have come to an end. That too was to change.
Islam in Central Asia
The people of Central Asia are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hannafi sect. Shia Muslims make up a small minority in some of the great trading cities, like Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as in Tajikistan, where the Ismaeli sect, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, can be found in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of the Pamir Mountains. (The Ismaelis also occupy adjacent areas south of the Pamirs in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Since 1991 Central Asia has also seen a meteoric rise of militant Islamic sects, each with its own brand of orthodoxy and sharia (Islamic law), and this phenomenon has obscured one of the most important aspects of traditional Central Asian Islam— its tolerance. Characterized by major advances in philosophy, ethics, legal codes, and scientific research under largely liberal political rulers, and spread through a vast region by Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, the Islam of Central Asia took many forms. Early Central Asian Muslims coexisted in relative peace not only with one another but also with the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who had established pockets of civilization in the region. Perhaps the most important Islamic movement to arise in Central Asia was Sufism: a form of Islamic mysticism that preached direct communion with God and tolerance towards all other forms of worship. Sufism originated in Central Asia and Persia soon after the Arab invasions. The name derives from the rough woolen cloaks worn by the early Sufi brothers (sufi means "wool" in Arabic), who inherited some of the symbols of pre-Islamic nomadic mystics. The Sufis encouraged popular participation in Islam through their opposition to authority, intellectualism, and the mullahs (clergy). Sufis urged all Muslims to experience God directly, without the intervention of priests or scholars— an important factor in the spread of Islam amongst Central Asia's sparse, nomadic population. The Sufi orders, or tariqas ("the way"), are best defined as "brotherhood[s] of Sufis who have a common pedigree of spiritual masters, ... in which elders initiate disciples and grant them formal permission to continue a common school of thought and practice." Sufis invoke God through the zikr, vocal (or sometimes silent) prayers, Dervishes—another Sufi sect— perfected into an art form. Many of the tariqas evolved into secret societies with their own codes of behavior and prayer. The tariqas played a major role in reviving Islam in the thirteenth century after the Mongol destruction, and they continued to sustain Islamic faith and practice centuries later in the Soviet era, when Islam was driven underground by the authorities. The most important tariqas are Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Yasawiyya, and Kubrawiyya. The Qadiriyya, probably the oldest extant order, was founded by Abd al-Qadir. A minor tariqa in Baghdad in the twelfth century, the Qadiriyya moved to Central Asia, becoming particularly strong during the thirteenth century, and then spread to Afghanistan and India. Central Asian Qadiris were centered mainly in the cities of Transoxiana. Kubra, the founder of Kubrawiyya, was martyred in the Mongol massacres in Central Asia in 1221. The Kubrawiyya order took strong hold in Khorezm (present-day Uzbekistan). The Yasawiyya order was founded by the poet and mystic Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166 and is buried in southern Kazakhstan. Their main influence was in the Fergana Valley and amongst the southern Turkic tribes. Muhammad ibn Baha ad-Din Naqshband (1317-89), the founder of the Naqshbandiyya tariqa, is still the most revered mystic and saint in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Even today his tomb outside Bukhara is the most important place of pilgrimage in Central Asia. Unlike other Sufi sects the Naqshbandis, though mystics, believe in active missionary work and political activism; many led revolts against the tsar and the Communists. The leader of the 1898 revolt in Andijan was a Naqshbandi. The Sufi orders spread their message to China via the Fergana Valley and to India and the Arab world through Afghanistan. Sufi spiritual leaders, especially the Naqshbandis, vied with the traditional ulema, who tended to be fiercely opposed to them, for influence amongst local rulers. And influence they had: the rulers of the Turkic dynasties would seek validation for their rule from the leading Sufi saints. The relationship of ruler and mystic, in the words of Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, tended to be "fraught with tension," for Sufi mystics saw themselves as eternal rulers, more powerful than the most autocratic temporal ruler. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the leading Naqshbandi families (leadership in the sect was frequently passed down from father to son) served as political advisers and spiritual guides to many of the khans who governed the increasingly fragmented Central Asia. Some of these Sufi families became rulers themselves. Many became rich and corrupt in the process, one of the reasons for the Jadid reforms in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Naqshbandi political activism played a major role in influencing militant Islamic movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and most recently the Fergana Valley. But beyond the oasis towns and valleys, the spread of Islam on the Central Asian steppe was slow and sporadic. Islam did not come to the Kazakh steppe until the seventeenth century, and even then the predominant Sufism incorporated ancient shamanistic traditions of the nomadic culture, such as the veneration of animals and nature. Although Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian kings, was discouraged by the Islamic invaders, elements continued to thrive on the steppe, taking on an Islamic coloring, as well as in Iran and India. Thus, early on in the history of Islam two branches of the religion emerged in Central Asia: the traditional, conservative, scholarly Islam of the settled areas and the oasis cultures that was dominated by local rulers and the ulema, and the much looser, less restrictive Islam of the nomads that still favored Sufism and pre-Islamic traditions. As historian Fernand Braudel noted, "Islam is essentially an urban religion. So Islam consists of a few densely populated regions, separated by vast stretches of empty space." Even today the nomadic Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen tribes are far less Islamicized— and much less susceptible to Islamic radicalism— than their ethnic counterparts in the settled oasis areas. The Arabs who brought Islam Central were soon displaced by Persian and Turkic tribes, each of whom adopted Islam. Of the two, for many centuries Persian was the dominant influence, lasting until the Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia around 1500. The Safavids changed Persia's state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam— step that considerably reduced Persian influence in Central Asia. In addition, Persia became preoccupied with combating the challenge of the Ottoman power in Turkey on its western borders, and Persian leaders therefore paid less attention to Central Asia. Nevertheless, the earlier Persian empires had left an enormous legacy in Central Asia in the arts, language, poetry, and sciences. Not until the Shaybani Uzbeks, who aggressively made their empire more Turkic, did Persian control and influence in Central Asia wane. The only vestiges of Persian ethnicity remaining in Central Asia today are the Tajiks, who speak Persian and are proud of their Persian culture and heritage. But the tension between Persian and Turkic culture continues, both in the competition for influence in Central Asia between Iran and Turkey and in the ongoing disputes between Tajikistan and Turkic Uzbekistan over Tajiks in Uzbekistan and Uzbeks in Tajikistan, and over borders. Many Tajiks assert that the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which Stalin handed over to Uzbekistan, should rightfully belong to Tajikistan. For they are Tajik cultural and historical centers. Central Asian Islam became less dynamic under the tsars, not because Central Asia's new Russian masters tried to interfere with the Islamic clergy, law, or practices but because they wooed them with modern advances: industry, education, technology. The Russians also supported the ultra-conservative ulema, whilst at the same time settling millions of ethnic Russians in the region to try and make good Russians out of Central Asians. But the new colonial masters were only partly successful. The introduction of Western ideas and sciences paved the way for a modernist reinterpretation of Islam by the Jadids, a reform sect of Tartars whose inspiration was Ismail Bay Gasprinski (1851-1914), founder of the influential Tartar-language newspaper Tercuman in 1883. Based on Usul-i-jadid (new educational principles), Jadidism was one of the many intellectual Islamic reform movements that swept the colonized Muslim world in the late nineteenth century. All sought in varying degrees to reconcile the problems associated with exposure to Western modernism with Muslim religion and culture, particularly for Muslims who lived in colonies ruled by non-Muslims. These movements, in India, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan, were primarily anticolonial and pan-Islamic, but they also advocated religious reform, modern education, and an understanding of the sciences. Jadid teachers and scholars in Tashkent and the Fergana Valley founded new schools with modern curricula: math, the sciences, theater, poetry, and Russian and Turkic literature, as well as traditional Islamic subjects. They staged plays and operas and published a number of newspapers that helped revive the Turkic languages and develop a modern Turkic culture. The literature they generated analyzed local history, culture, and politics in a modern way for the first time. This embrace of modernism brought the Jadids into conflict not just with the Russians but also with the ulema, whom they considered reactionary and obscurantist. For their part the Russians had encouraged the ulema to continue their practice of a conservative interpretation of the sharia as a way of countering anti-Russian Islamic and nationalist movements. For all their success the Jadids remained an intellectual rather than a mass movement, divided over ideology and politics. When the 1917 revolution came, some Jadids backed the Bolsheviks because they sought to throw over the tsarist empire and saw in the Communist ideology a chance of greater freedom, the adoption of modern ideas, and education whilst others resisted them because of their lack of respect for Islam. The Jadids who joined the Communist Party after 1917 played a critical role in helping build indigenous Communist parties in Central Asia, but it did them little good. The Soviets termed the Jadids bourgeois reformers and banned their literature. When Stalin came to power he began a steady purge of Jadids; the last Jadids were eliminated in the massacres of 1937. During the brief cultural flowering after independence in 1991, Uzbek intellectuals attempted to republish and popularize Jadid writings, but they were quickly suppressed. Uzbek President Islam Karimov discourages all attempts to renew interest in Jadidism, although the movement has immense relevance in today's discussion of the way Islam, nationalism, and democracy can coexist in Central Asia.
Sembra che Paolo Zampolli abbia ricevuto la nomina direttamente da Trump, ma nessuna istituzione italiana ne sa niente, e non si sa neanche cosa viene a fare
@Politica interna, europea e internazionale «Il Parlamento italiano non è il giocattolo di Starlink». Così il deputato Andrea Casu del Partito democratico risponde al rappresentante in Italia del patron di Starlink, Elon Musk, che ieri aveva
⏰ Per la seconda edizione del concorso “Da uno sguardo: film di studentesse e studenti contro la violenza sulle donne” c’è tempo fino al #31marzo, per inviare le candidature!
Il #concorso, promosso dal #MIM, dal Dipartimento per le Pari Opportunita…
⏰ Per la seconda edizione del concorso “Da uno sguardo: film di studentesse e studenti contro la violenza sulle donne” c’è tempo fino al #31marzo, per inviare le candidature!
Il #concorso, promosso dal #MIM, dal Dipartimento per le Pari Opportunita…
Francesco
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