Movies mirror the time they were made. [ErnieTech] asserts that we can see what people thought about computers back in 1957 by watching the classic Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie “Desk Set.” What’s more, he thinks this might be the first movie appearance of a human-like computer. On a side note, in the UK this movie was known as “The Other Woman.”

The story is about an MIT computer expert computerizing a broadcasting company who, of course, finds romance and, at least towards the end, comedy.

Of course, we are interested in the computer. It was supposedly an IBM machine and while IBM apparently provided some equipment (probably typewriters and tape drives), the computer is clearly just a ton of light bulbs. It was named Emmie, which was a nickname for EMERAC. Oddly enough, it was about like a modern web search engine or chatbot, answering random research questions. The difference is they had fed all the world’s knowledge into it themselves using punched cards.

The video has spoilers, but for a movie made in 1957, that’s not really an issue. The ending is pretty predictable, anyway. Like many people in 1957, there was a fear that “computers were going to take all our jobs!” [Ernie] makes the point that this was a common trope where the computer would run the Enterprise company and then made a big mistake, and everyone realized we still needed humans. EMERAC later guest-starred in the movie “The Fly.” It was just a background player in the chorus, though.

He also points out that many of the things people thought about the widespread adoption of computers are still true today if you replace computer with AI. Turns out, you still need to know how to reset the system.

[Ernie] did a video about Colossus last month, a topic we also visited last year. One of our favorite fictional computers, though, was more recent from “The Three Body Problem.”

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hackaday.com/2025/03/08/fictio…

Although most people would use C, C++ or MicroPython for programming microcontrollers, there are a few more obscure options out there as well, with MicroZig being one of them. Recently [Andrew Conlin] wrote about how to use MicroZig with the Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU, showing the process of writing an SSD1306 OLED display driver and running it. Although MicroZig has since published a built-in version, the blog post gives a good impression of what developing with MicroZig is like.

Zig is a programming language which seeks to improve on the C language, adding memory safety, safe pointers (via option types), while keeping as much as possible of what makes C so useful for low-level development intact. The MicroZig project customizes Zig for use in embedded projects, targeting platforms including the Raspberry Pi MCUs and STM32. During [Andrew]’s usage of MicroZig it was less the language or supplied tooling that tripped him up, and more just the convoluted initialization of the SSD1306 controller, which is probably a good sign. The resulting project code can be found on his GitHub page.

hackaday.com/2025/03/08/writin…

If you’re a photography enthusiast, you probably own quite a few cameras, but the chances are your “good” one will have interchangeable lenses. Once you’ve exhausted the possibilities of the kit lens, you can try different focal lengths and effects, but you’ll soon find out that good glass isn’t cheap. Can you solve this problem by making your own lenses? [Billt] has done just that.

Given some CAD skills, it’s possible to replicate the mount on an existing lens, but he takes a shortcut by using a readily available camera cap project. There are two lenses detailed in the video below the break; the first is a plastic lens from a disposable camera, while the second takes one from a Holga toy camera. The plastic lens is inserted mid-print, giving the colour aberrations and soft focus you’d expect, while the Holga lens is mounted on a slide for focusing. There may be some room for improvement there, but the result is a pair of fun lenses for experimentation for not much outlay. Given the number of broken older cameras out there, it should be relatively easy for anyone wanting to try this for themselves to have a go.

The video is below the break, but while you’re on this path, take a look at a previous project using disposable camera lenses. Or, consider printing an entire camera.

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Il report mensile di Recorded Future sulle vulnerabilità CVE per febbraio 2025 offre una panoramica dettagliata sulle minacce informatiche attuali, evidenziando un leggero calo rispetto al mese precedente. A fronte di 25 vulnerabilità ad alto impatto identificate, rispetto alle 33 di gennaio, il livello di rischio rimane comunque elevato. Diverse di queste falle risultano essere già attivamente sfruttate da cybercriminali, rendendo fondamentale una risposta tempestiva da parte dei team di sicurezza aziendali.

Uno degli aspetti più importanti di questo report è la possibilità di analizzare il problema da due prospettive complementari: quella dei CEO e quella dei responsabili IT e CISO. Da un lato, i leader aziendali devono comprendere come queste vulnerabilità possano tradursi in rischi concreti per il business, con possibili impatti operativi, finanziari e reputazionali. Dall’altro, i responsabili della sicurezza e della gestione IT devono approfondire le minacce a livello tecnico, per poter implementare contromisure efficaci e proteggere l’infrastruttura aziendale da attacchi mirati. Affrontare la cybersecurity con una visione unitaria, che coniughi strategia e operatività, è la chiave per garantire la resilienza digitale delle aziende.

Per i CEO: il rischio strategico per le aziende

Per i leader aziendali, le vulnerabilità individuate non sono solo questioni tecniche, ma rappresentano un rischio concreto per la continuità operativa e la sicurezza dei dati. In particolare, alcune di queste falle, come CVE-2025-0108 e CVE-2025-0111, risultano essere particolarmente pericolose poiché, se combinate con una terza vulnerabilità, consentono agli attaccanti di ottenere l’accesso root ai firewall Palo Alto. Questo scenario potrebbe tradursi in un’esposizione critica di dati sensibili, aprendo la strada a possibili attacchi ransomware o episodi di spionaggio industriale.

Le aziende devono quindi valutare attentamente i potenziali rischi derivanti da queste vulnerabilità. Un attacco mirato potrebbe non solo causare un’interruzione delle operazioni, ma anche compromettere dati riservati e impattare gravemente la reputazione dell’azienda. Per questo motivo, è fondamentale che i CEO si assicurino che i team IT adottino un approccio proattivo, implementando aggiornamenti tempestivi e strategie di protezione avanzate, come il monitoraggio continuo delle minacce e la segmentazione della rete.

Per IT Manager e CISO: minacce emergenti e contromisure tecniche

Sul piano tecnico, il report evidenzia quattro vulnerabilità zero-day di particolare rilevanza, che coinvolgono firewall, gateway wireless e software open-source come 7-Zip. Un esempio significativo è la CVE-2025-0411, sfruttata da attori russi per colpire organizzazioni ucraine attraverso campagne di spear phishing. Questo dimostra ancora una volta come le falle nei software possano essere rapidamente utilizzate per operazioni di cyber warfare o attacchi mirati su larga scala.

Ecco alcune delle vulnerabilità più rilevanti individuate:

• CVE-2025-0108 (Palo Alto PAN-OS) – Bypass dell’autenticazione nella gestione web dei firewall.
• CVE-2024-40890 (Zyxel DSL CPE) – Iniezione di comandi OS tramite interfaccia CGI, con rischio di esecuzione remota di codice.
• CVE-2025-0411 (7-Zip) – Meccanismo di protezione bypassato che consente l’esecuzione di file malevoli senza avviso all’utente.
• CVE-2025-21418 (Windows AFD Driver) – Overflow di buffer che consente l’elevazione dei privilegi sui sistemi Windows Server.

Affrontare queste minacce richiede un approccio strategico. Gli aggiornamenti tempestivi restano la difesa principale: è essenziale applicare le patch più recenti per tutti i sistemi vulnerabili. Inoltre, è consigliabile limitare l’accesso alle interfacce di gestione ai soli IP interni affidabili, riducendo così la superficie di attacco disponibile per i cybercriminali. Un altro aspetto chiave è il monitoraggio costante delle minacce, sfruttando piattaforme di threat intelligence in grado di individuare in tempo reale eventuali tentativi di exploit. Infine, adottare un modello di sicurezza Zero Trust rappresenta un ulteriore livello di protezione, basandosi sul principio “never trust, always verify”.

Il report di febbraio 2025 di Recorded Future evidenzia ancora una volta come le minacce informatiche siano sempre più sofisticate e rapide nell’evoluzione. La sicurezza non è più una questione esclusivamente tecnica, ma un pilastro essenziale della governance aziendale. Per affrontare con successo queste sfide, è necessario un approccio integrato che coinvolga sia il top management sia i team di sicurezza operativa, promuovendo una cultura della cybersecurity orientata alla prevenzione e alla reattività.

L'articolo Analisi del Report CVE di Recorded Future – Febbraio 2025 proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

#CentralAsia #history #AhmedRashid

1 Conquerors, Khans and Communists

As it had been so many times before, the fate of Central Asia was to be decided. The khans, or chiefs, of the great tribes - the Kazakh ordas, the Mongol hordes, the Uzbek Shaybanis and the Tajik clans - were gathering to discuss their fate on a cold winter's evening. They arrived wrapped up in great fur coats and fur hats with earflaps that stretched across their faces hiding them from view. Flurries of snow swept across the earth as the chiefs, with their advisers and bodyguards in tow, greeted each other with the customary Muslim warmth.
An honour guard, its members shivering in the cold, went through an elaborate military drill to welcome each delegation. Their hands were close to freezing as they grasped their weapons and brought them level to present arms to the guests. In one corner of the arrival ground a band of musicians played the national anthems of the tribes and traditional tunes. In between the arrival of the delegations, the musicians clapped their hands to keep warm and rubbed their lips to prevent them chapping. In another corner young girls, dressed in elaborate and colourful costumes, waited to present frozen flowers to the guests.
Tonight the khans would feast together, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by carpets and silk pillows, and discuss the critical situation informally, gauging what the others felt and what positions they were likely to take in public.Tomorrow there would be a grand tribal assembly, the ulus or majlis or jirga - there are many names for it - where they would all present their views.The leaders that gathered that night were the heirs of the conquerors of the world, men such as Genghis Khan, Babar and Tamerlane. Their ancestors were also some of the greatest scientists, poets, philosophers and mystics that the steppe has ever produced.The majority of these leaders had never seen the sea: they lived in a landlocked region among the highest mountain ranges in the world, the harshest deserts and the most lush oases ever tilled by man.Yet that night there was a strange tension in the air, a disquiet and nervousness that old-timers had never seen before. Some of the leaders looked fearful, which was hardly normal for the warriors of the Central Asian steppe.
The setting for the meeting was Ashkhabad, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. The chiefs were the old communist party bosses and now presidents of the republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The date was 12 December 1991.The reason for the meeting was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These heirs of Genghis Khan's warrior nomads and Stalin's communist party machine had suddenly been orphaned; everything they had known for the past seventy-four years was disappearing before their eyes. Four days earlier at a dacha near Brest, 3,000 kilometres away, presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shuskevich of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) had signed a treaty formally disbanding the Soviet Union and creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In getting rid of the 1917 Revolution and the legacy of Lenin, these Slavic leaders had not bothered to inform or consult with their fellow republican presidents in Central Asia.
Whereas once the Muslims of Central Asia had decided the fate of Russia, now the Slavs were taking their own decisions and seemed prepared to dump Central Asia in the process. That day, shivering on the airport tarmac in Ashkhabad as I watched each delegation arrive, the band strike up and the honour guard salute, I witnessed people's palpable fury at the Slavs and, in particular, the anti-Russian feeling. There was talk of racial discrimination, of ethnic o and the Cross, were again coming to life. Once again history was repeating itself.
The next day at Ashkhabad the five presidents of the Central Asian republics sat down together at a press conference and declared, more or less, that they had eaten humble pie. On a long, elevated platform, presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Rakhmon Nabiev of Tajikistan, Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan said that they were willing to join the CIS, but on the basis of equality. They demanded that they too be made founder members of the CIS. There was not a word of anger against Russia or Yeltsin - in public the leaders swallowed their resentment. Russia was still too powerful to annoy. A week later, on 21 December in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, the new CIS was formed with eleven out of the fifteen former Soviet republics becoming members. The three Baltic republics were gone for good and Georgia stood aloof. The Soviet state had ceased to exist.
The life blood of the Soviet state had been ebbing away ever since the August coup attempt in Moscow. That had been carried out by Communist hardliners to prevent President Gorbachev signing a new Union treaty that would have still retained some of the close links between the republics.The irony was that the failed coup ensured that public opinion in Russia and Ukraine, the two most powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, demanded that they leave the Soviet Union altogether. It was as though a mother was preparing to see her children drown. 'Why should we bailout these strife-torn regions of Central Asia, who share nothing with us - least of all our religion. We would be much better off on our own, for then Russia could become a great power again,' said an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, one of the principal economic advisers to President Yeltsin. If this was the mood in Moscow in the offices of the highest in the land, the mood in the streets was even more militandy in favour of Russian independence.
Decades of indoctrination, about the principals of the Soviet State and its internationalist duties had been thrown out of the window. Central Asia in particular was no longer considered part of the great and glorious Soviet motherland, but instead was seen as culturally, racially and in religious terms totally separate from Russia.The socialist premiss of equality, and specifically that the poorer regions of the Soviet state should be developed to become equal to Russia, was now nothing but a naive and expensive policy that was draining the Russian exchequer. The new Soviet man whom communism was supposed to create was now suddenly reduced to defending ethnic frontiers.
The leaders meeting in Ashkhabad knew well the present mood amongst the Slavs, which was being pandered to by leaders such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk, and they were furious. Since the August coup attempt, the Central Asian leaders had backed Gorbachev in his demand for a strong centre. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was in the forefront of those arguing for a strong centre in order to keep the military, the nuclear arsenal, the currency and the economy under a single control. He was firmly backed by other Central Asian leaders - except for the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, who six months earlier had supported the idea of a loose commonwealth structure instead of the Soviet state.
Delegation members spoke in private about how Yeltsin had abused and humiliated them by secretly going ahead with the Minsk treaty. The leaders spoke bravely of how they would form a new Central Asian common market. 'All the Central Asian states must get together to form a new confederation or our economic development will be stalled,' said President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. 'A Central Asian community is the need of the hour,' echoed the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akaev. Yet everyone knew that for the time being these were merely words. Their faces showed their real fears. Since 1917 Central Asia, the land of the greatest trading routes in history, had become little more than an economic colony for Moscow, producing cotton, metals and other raw materials for the Soviet economic powerhouse. When that powerhouse was seen to be built on sand, Central Asia had nowhere else to turn. By thousands of threads, from electricity grids to oil pipelines to telephone lines, the Central Asian republics were tied into Russia. Moscow was an economic and financial spider's web from which no leader on that day could ever see himself disentangled.
That night in Ashkhabad there were no celebrations. 'We are not celebrating, we are mourning, ' said a Turkoman Foreign Ministry official. 'The future is extremely bleak. The West will help Russia and other Slav republics to survive, but who will help us? ' asked a member of the Uzbek delegation. Here was the final and tragic irony. The break-up of the Soviet Union had given Central Asia that very independence that their forefathers had struggled for, but they were hesitating to eat from it. Economically dependent on Moscow and politically desirous of a strong centre that would guarantee a peacekeeping role for the CIS army, the five states were now faced with rebuilding their economies, forging independent foreign policies and ensuring some degree of foreign aid. The communist bureaucracies that these leaders had risen from had only known subservience and dependency on Moscow for the party line. Now there was no line and no party. All lines had been cut.
Moreover they were all faced in varying degrees with radical Islam, assertive ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic rivalries, and now had to create their own security forces to maintain law and order. Kazakhstan had suddenly become an independent nuclear power - for the only reason that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were based on its soil. When Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and Pakistan hailed Kazakhstan as the first independent Muslim state to have nuclear weapons, that only added to Nazarbayev's nervousness. Anti-Russian feeling amongst the local populations had to be contained so that it would not create a new bloody battleground and a further excuse for Moscow to abandon Central Asia. There was a large and powerful Russian minority in every republic, the largest being in Kazakhstan where it formed nearly half the population.These Russians faced their own crisis: whether to brave the coming ethnic storms in Central Asia or to migrate back to Russia, a move that could trigger off large-scale economic disruption in the republics because it was the Russians who were the technical brains and manpower behind the economy. All these problems, for which the former communist bureaucracies were ill prepared, came as shops emptied fast and food shortages grew.
If the end of tsarist Russia was a turning point for Central Asia in the first part ofthe twentieth century, because it introduced the region to the modern era and a new ideological and economic system, then the end of the Soviet Union has been an equally traumatic turning point, for it created five new independent states in the heart of Muslim Asia. Whereas the transformation of Central Asia after October 1917 was carried out with an unprecedented degree of bloodletting, which decimated the population, the transformation in December 1991 took place without a single dead body in the streets. It was a remarkable way to achieve independence, even though just a few months later Tajikistan was to be in the grip of a brutal civil war.

Today Central Asia comprises five independent republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From its beginning in 1917, the Soviet state never included Kazakhstan in Muslim Central Asia, preferring to give it a non-Asian identity by linking it closely to Russia and Siberia.Today, however, the Kazakhs themselves and the world at large believe they are very much part of the region. Central Asia covers an area of 3,994,300 square kilometres which includes some of the most sparsely populated regions in the world. Its population of only 51 million people includes more than 100 different ethnic groups, from Germans and Austrians to Tibetans and Koreans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks. Uzbekistan has a population of 20.5 million, and Uzbeks form substantial minorities in all other
four republics. There were some 10.6 million Russians living in Central Asia in 1992, but there has been a large-scale exodus of Russians from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan because of fears of ethnic violence and Islamic fundamentalism.
Tashkent and Ashkhabad, the capitals of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have long urban histories but the other three capital cities, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Alma Ata in Kazakhstan and Beshkek in Kyrgyzstan, were created by the Bolsheviks to give a sense of ethnic identity to those nationalities. Uzbekistan contains all the most famous historical cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand. They were the seats of nomadic empires and settled kingdoms in the past, as well as being centres in the development of Islam throughout the region. For centuries the hundreds of madrasahs, or Islamic colleges in Bukhara and Samarkand attracted students from as far away as Morocco and Indonesia. Bukhara is seen by many Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and the most important city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Central Asia was also the birthplace of Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam which spread rapidly to Africa and Asia.
Central Asia lies at the heart ofthe Eurasian continent. Completely landlocked, it borders Iran and Aghanistan to the south, China to the east and Russia to the north and west.The main Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges in the south and theTien Shan mountains in the east. There are no fixed boundaries in the north: where the Kazakh steppe merges into the Siberian steppe in a flat landscape that is punctured with numerous lakes. Although thousands of rivers start in the mountains, only two rivers travel for any length and finally reach the landlocked Aral Sea.The Amudarya, the Oxus river of ancient mythology, originates in the Hindu Kush range, runs along the southern-border of Central Asia skirting Afghanistan and Iran, and reaches the Aral Sea after a journey of 2,500 kilometres. The Syrdarya or Jaxartes river originates in the Tien Shan (where it is first called the Naryn river), passes through the Ferghana valley and journeys north of the Kyzlkum desert to reach the Aral Sea after travelling 2,200 kilometres. Thousands of smaller rivers flow down from the mountains but their waters disappear into the sands of the great deserts.
The lands between these two rivers, which today comprises Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have produced the main developments of Central Asian history and culture. Both these broad rivers formed formidable frontiers for the ancient world. The Amudarya divided the Persian empire and its culture from the Turkic nomadic empires of the Central Asian steppe.The same river later formed the frontier for the Tsar and the communists, separating Central Asia from first the British empire in India and then the Muslim world to the south. Meanwhile the Syrdarya formed the only northern barrier for the Persian, Greek, Arab and then Turkic kingdoms in Central Asia, protecting them from nomadic invasions from Mongolia and the Gobi desert.
All the mountain ranges of Central Asia and Afghanistan converge at the Pamirs, known as the Roof of the World, mountains which until only recently were considered to form one of the most inaccessible ranges because of its height, its snows and its freezing temperatures. In the eighteenth century the Pamirs were called the Third Pole, after the North and South poles, because they were so unknown. The Tien Shan and Kun Lun ranges run north and east from the Pamirs.
It was only in the 1850s that Russian explorers first set foot on the Tien Shan, locally called the Mountains of the Spirits because of the voices that seemed to emanate from their glaciers. Marco Polo was the first Western traveller to traverse the Tien Shan range. 'Even by daylight men hear the voices of the Spirits and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments. Travellers make a point of staying close together,' he wrote. The Kun Lun were known in ancient Chinese mythology as the Celestial Peaks.
In the centre of the region lie two of the largest deserts in the world. In the south, covering much of present-day Turkmenistan, is the Karakum or 'desert of black sands', which covers 350,000 square kilometres of some of the most arid terrain on earth, where rain is so rare that rainstorms are events recounted decades later by the local nomads.To its north in present-day Uzbekistan is the Kyzlkum or 'red sands' desert, which covers another 300,000 square kilometres and is one and a half times the size of Britain. Despite the scarcity of water, both these deserts have distinctive fauna and flora, as well as being home for some of the toughest nomadic tribes in the world, in particular the Turkomen.
As fearsome as the mountains and deserts are, so the valleys are lush, fertile and capable of producing an abundance and huge variety of crops. In 1900 the total irrigated land in Central Asia was an estimated 46,000 square kilometres of which 12,500 square kilometres lay in the oases of Bukhara, 9,000 square kilometres in the Ferghana valley and 300 square kilometres in and around Khiva. Ancient irrigation was carried out by digging wells and using the wheel system to raise water, as well as the kareez method, and by taking water from the rivers. Agriculture in Central Asia has always been carried out around oasis settlements where water was readily available. Each oasis was a selfcontained economic unit and autonomous except for the barter trade with surrounding nomads and the caravans that passed through them. Oases were frequently devastated or ransacked by the nomadic armies sweeping through, but it took them only one or two agricultural cycles to revive. It was only in the eighteenth century that the pauperized local rulers of Central Asia began to squeeze farmers for taxes and tributes.
At the heart of Central Asia is the Ferghana valley, once a cohesive economic unit but divided in the 1930s by Stalin between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The valley is 300 kilometres long and 170 kilometres wide and its history, the power of its princes and mullahs and its ability to mount sustained resistance against all outsiders, has made it the political and Islamic nerve centre of Central Asia. With a population of 7 million people, the narrow valley is the most densely populated region in Central Asia. The Soviet regime changed this natural geography of oasis settlements by irrigating vast areas of the steppe for cotton and grain cultivation. The project was initially highly successful, but the lack of planning and foresight later created massive problems which the Soviet regime refused to acknowledge and which are only coming to the surface today. Acute water shortages, pollution, the drying-up of lakes and seas, desertification and environmental catastrophes brought on by nuclear waste are only some of the problems that these newly independent republics now face. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that the nomads have always lived at one with their environment. The nomad's respect for the environment is unmatched anywhere in the world. Thus the callousness with which the Soviet system treated the land has been particularly galling to the nomadic population.
Much of the world's ancient history originated in Central Asia for it was the birthplace of the great warrior tribes that conquered Russia, Europe, India and China. Later we look in greater detail at the history of the individual races of Central Asia, even though it is difficult to split the ancient history of a region that, until Stalin, considered itself as one geographical and even historical entity.
For example, in the history of which modern day republic does one include the story of Alexander the Great or of Genghis Khan, two conquerors who affected the whole region, or the story of the Saminid kings who laid the foundations for the lasting influence of the Persian language and culture in Central Asia? Later we attempt to discuss these figures according to the regions where they had the most influence.
However, a brief outline of Central Asian history is necessary if one is to understand the cut and thrust of its present-day politics.
To the classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, Central Asia was known as Transoxiana, or the region beyond the Oxus river. The Oxus was only one of many ancient names given to the Amudarya river.
To the Arabs Central Asia was known as 'the land between two rivers' - the Syrdarya and the Amudarya.
To the English Elizabethans it was known as Tartary.
It was the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller and writer Ibn Battuta,who coined the word Turkestan, meaning 'the land inhabited by Turks'.
The nineteenth-century British writer Rudyard Kipling called Central Asia the 'Back of Beyond'. The Chinese built the Great Wall of China precisely to keep out the tribes from Mongolia and Central Asia.
European writers wrote about Central Asia without having the slightest idea what it was really like and often even where it was.
The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in his verse drama 'Tamburlaine the Great' describes Central Asia and the exploits of Tamerlane in some detail, much of it wrong. Nevertheless, Marlowe's poetry helped to build the image of awesome power and megalomania that Central Asian leaders came to represent. As 'Tamburlaine' says in a more modest moment:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Poets such as John Milton and the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped build up the mystique of Central Asia in European eyes.
Writers such as G.A. Henty and Kipling described it in their adventure novels as a barbaric, unpredictable region - even though neither had ever been there.
For the European outsider, Central Asia was a land where the imagination could run riot and take whatever liberty it liked, so few Westerners ever travelled there.
In one way or another Central Asia has always gripped the imagination of outsiders, whether they be Muslim or Christian, European or Asian. For the West it has epitomized the mystery of the Orient and the wide open spaces of the steppe punctuated by bazaars, ruthless tyrants and nomadic armies.
In the nineteenth century Central Asia was permanently etched in the minds of British schoolboys because the Great Game played between the Russian and the British empires led to numerous adventure stories about the region.
For Muslims Central Asia has epitomized the distant and inaccessible, but still the second holiest region after Saudi Arabia - steeped in Islam and mysticism, and the originator of so many Muslim races.
For the Russians it has been a reminder of one of the most painful parts of their history, as they lived for centuries under Mongol rulers and their successors, the Tartars. Russian mothers still use the threat 'the Tartars are coming' to frighten little children into bed or into doing their homework. Russian prejudices remain deeply ingrained. Ethnic riots in Central Asian cities are still described by Russian commentators as 'riots between rampaging mobs' or 'crazed Islamic fundamentalists'. In 1990, after ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, no less a person than the Soviet interior minister Vadim Bakatin described them as 'a reflection of primitive and medieval nationalism'.The same kind of nationalism being espoused in the Baltic republics or Ukraine at the time was never described in such a way.
Central Asia has always been different. At the heart of the history of Central Asia is not the story of princes and their courts, but the story of the nomad and his horse. In recent years Soviet archaeological research has pushed back the date when man first began herding animals in Asia to around 4000 BC. It is now thought that the horse was first domesticated in the Ukraine and that the cult of the horse spread rapidly eastward.
During the Neolithic Age, between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Central Asia saw the development of mixed farming in which tribes hunted, herded and grew some crops. Based around the Caspian Sea these tribes developed pottery and stone tools as they steadily moved eastward into Central Asia.
Recent excavations at Altyn Tepe, near present-day Ashkhabad, revealed Neolithic settlements whose peoples traded with Persia and Mesopotamia in the Middle East. Later, pure pastoralism developed as tribes wandered further afield from their oasis settlements looking for pasture for their ever-larger herds of animals.
From around 1700 BC a distinct nomadic culture emerged. The evidence of unearthed burial mounds points to the importance given to horses and camels, which were killed and buried alongside their owners.
Later, between 1700 and 1000 BC, mounted nomadism became common, with the training of horses for war and their harnessing to chariots once the spoked wheel had been invented. When the Hittites conquered Anatolia in 1286 BC, mounted warriors and chariots were used for the first time as part of the established battle order.
The Saka tribes settled around the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were the first mounted nomads to found a dynasty in the region.
At its height around 800 BC, this dynasty ruled an area including that of modern-day Iran, western Turkey and Central Asia. Squeezed by growing Persian power, the Sakas later retreated into the Pamirs and the Tien Shan mountains, in the region today known as Kyrgyzstan.They remained here until 200 BC, when they were finally conquered by the Persians.
From 700 to 300 BC the Scythian tribes, who were settled north of the Syrdarya, swept southward conquering Central Asia and then India and Syria. The Scythians became the main antagonists of the Persian kings and later Alexander the Great, but today there is little evidence of what became of them; they must have been assimilated into the great ethnic melting pot of Central and South Asia.
The early Persian kings were the first to demarcate Central Asia, now inhabited by the offshoots of the Saka tribes. They divided the region between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers (darya means 'river' in Persian) and stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pamir mountains into three distinct regions. From west to east these were Chorasmia, Bactria and Sogdiana.The latter included modern-day Tajikistan, eastern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, while Bactria included much of present-day Uzbekistan.The Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC was to rule Central Asia for the next two hundred years, until the arrival of the Greeks.
It was in Bactria that Zoroaster, who was born in modern Azerbaijan, first appeared with a new reIigion of fire worship. Zoroastrianism spread rapidly through Bactria Ind Sogdiana and was later adopted by the Persians.
The single aberration in this history of invasions from the east and south was the arrival from Europe of the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After defeating the Persians, Alexander conquered Bactria and Sogdiana between 329 and 327 BC. Alexander left an indelible mark on Central Asia, founding cities, promoting Hellenic culture and creating far greater uniformity within the region than it had ever known before. One of his successors, General Selucucos, founded the Selucid dynasty which ruled Bactria and large parts of Sogdiana.
In 239 BC another Greco-Bactrian kingdom was established which ruled from the Afghan city of Balkh. The Bactrians were to be finally overthrown by nomadic invaders from the east in around 140 BC.
Meanwhile the western region of Central Asia in present-day Turkmenistan continued to be ruled by the Parthian dynasty which was based on the Saka tribes. In 224 BC they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. With the southern belt of Central Asia firmly under the control of the Persians, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century BC by successive waves of more Sakas, who continued south to Aghanistan and India. After these invasions, Buddhism also arrived and much closer contact was established between Central Asia and China to the east and India to the south.
In the eastern region of Central Asia in what is now Kyrgyzstan, "'the Sarmatian nomads with their Siberian animal culture moved south from Siberia and dominated the region from around 500 BC onwards. The first raids into Central Asia by Chinese princes took place around 100 BC and for a time they captured the Ferghana valley and imposed an annual tribute of 1,000 stallions on their victims.The Chinese were convinced that the famous horses of the Ferghana sweated blood. These horses were not only highly prized in the Chinese army, but also served as models for all horse sculpture across China.
In time both the Sarmatians and the Chinese were pressed from the rast by the Huns, the forefathers of the Mongols, who came out of the Gobi desert to occupy Kasghar in Xinjiang around 200 BC, crossed Central Asia and reached the Volga river in Russia by AD 400. Their empire - the first nomadic Mongol empire - stretched from Korea to the Ural mountains in Russia. The descriptions of the Huns fit the modern Kazakhs, who retain the same stocky physique and still have the largest mean head size of any people in the world. The Hepthalities, orWhite Huns, went on to conquer eastern Europe and parts of India, and in the fifth century Huns settled on the Danube rallied around their chief Attila and marched on Rome.
As the Huns moved westward, the vacuum in the east was filled by the Turkic tribes, who began what was to be a series of invasions westward spread over several centuries. The Turkic tribes originally inhabited the Alatau mountains in eastern Central Asia, from around 1000 BC onwards.
The word Tur or Turkic was given by the Chinese to signify all those nomadic tribes who occupied the region from Mongolia to the Black Sea and who posed a threat to the Chinese empire. Raids by the early Turkic tribes forced the Chinese to build the Great Wall of China. Around AD 200 these tribes turned around from attacking the Chinese in the east to attacking the oasis towns in Central Asia to the west. Some Turkic tribes settled in the Ferghana valley. By AD 500 these Turkic nomads were to defeat both the Persian Sassanids and the remainder of the Huns in the western part of Central Asia. Meanwhile eastern Central Asia was in the hands of the Uighur Turkic tribes, who set up a nomadic empire that straddled the border between present-day former Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang.
Soon after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Central Asia was invaded by the Arabs of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. Crossing Persia, the Arabs first defeated Zubil, the Turkic king of Kabul, and then, crossing the Oxus for the first time, defeated the Sassanids at Merv in AD 651.The Arabs began the process of converting Central Asia to Islam, and some 50,000 Arab families arrived to settle in Merv.
The second wave of Arab conquests began in 705 when Bukhara and Samarkand were conquered. By 713 the Arabs ruled over the Ferghana valley and had ventured as far east as Kasghar.
The Zoroastrian fire temples in Samarkand and Bukhara were destroyed as the conquered people converted to Islam. The Arabs ruled Central Asia from the kingdom of Khorasan, which covered what is today western Afghanistan, northern Iran and Turkmenistan.
The Arab capital was at Merv, near the present-day Turkoman city of Mary. Merv, called the Queen of the World, developed as a major centre of Islamic learning under the Arabs and later the Seljuk Turks, until it was destroyed by the Mongols.
The Arab conquests saw a flowering of Islamic thought, philosophy and mysticism which was to turn Bukhara into a city second only to Mecca for its religiosity and learning. Al Bokhari (809-69), the philosopher and commentator on the Koran, wrote the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, which is still revered as one of the most important works in Islam. As the Arabs drove northwards, the Chinese were expanding into eastern Central Asia, and in 751, at Talas, the Muslim Arabs and the Chinese at last met in batle.The decisive victory of the Arabs ensured that the Chinese would encroach no further into Central Asia than Xinjiang.
By AD 900 several independent Muslim kingdoms had sprung up In Central Asia. The most important of these dynasties were the Persian Samanids who ruled from 874 to 999 and made their capital at Bukhara, from where they acted as patrons to one of the greatest periods of Islamic art, culture and science that Central Asia was ever to see.The Samanids were descended from Saman, a Zoroastrian from Dalkh in Afghanistan, whose son Ismail captured Khorasan and later the whole of Persia.
With a well-organized army and bureaucracy, the Samanids built up extensive trading links with Europe and China, thus regulating the Silk Route. During Samanid rule Central Asia became a recognized entity, considered to be not at the edges of the world but It the very centre of the known world, and which armies, merchants and peoples travelling from west to east had to traverse. With physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians such as AI Biruni and poets such as Firdausi, the Samanid court left an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture that was not to be eroded in Central Asia until the advent of communism.
The defeat of the Samanids by AIptgin, a Turkic officer of slave origins who formerly belonged to the Samanid army, saw the end of Persian political domination in Central Asia and the advent of Turkic domination. At Ghazni in Aghanistan the Turkic tribes created the Ghaznavid dynasty, which was to rule over a region that included parts of Central Asia and India. Its strongest ruler, Mahmood of Ghazni, undertook seventeen campaigns into India between 1001 and 1024 and conquered much of Central Asia. A series of invasions from the north by fresh Turkic tribes brought the Seljuk Turks to centre stage. The Seljuks first settled near Bukhara before they moved south.They captured Merv and then defeated the Ghaznavids in 1041, establishing an empire that spread as far as Turkey. By 1055 the Seljuk chief,Tughril Beg, stood outside the gates of Baghdad.
For over 200 years the Seljuks ruled from the Pamirs to Iraq, thus uniting for the first time under Turkic hegemony Central Asia with Persia and the Arab world. At the height of Seljuk rule, King Malikshah (1072"-92) ruled from Kasghar to Jerusalem and protected the booming trade along the Silk Route between Syria, Central Asia and China. The Seljuks were challenged and finally defeated by the Mongols under Genghis Khan.The Seljuk execution of Genghis Khan's envoy in 1218 and the murder of 450 Muslim merchants who had traded with the Mongols led Genghis Khan to attack their domains in Central Asia. Seljuk high-handedness is thus often blamed for the Mongol onslaught over Asia and Europe that was to follow. When the Seljuks and other Turkic tribes had moved westward they left behind in the Gobi desert their kinsmen, the Mongols, who gradually came to inhabit the region south of Lake Baikal.
Genghis Khan, born in 1155, succeeded in uniting the local tribes and in 1206 he was elected the Great Khan at a tribal meeting which adopted the name Mongol for a new tribal confederacy.
Later called the Golden Horde, this confederacy included all the tribes that today make up the major ethnic groups in Central Asia.
The exception are the Tajiks who derive their ancestry directly from the ancient Sogdians.The ancient Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkomen were the warriors, whilst the Uighurs formed the bulk of Genghis bureaucracy because under Chinese influence they had developed a written script and a code of laws, which Genghis Khan was to adapt to Mongol needs.
Nobody in Central Asia or Europe could imagine what was about to appear over the horizon. The Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing 30,000 people and burning the city to the ground in the process. 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.'
In the next twelve months the whole of Central Asia fell to the Mongols. In 1223 an army of Tartar tribes led by Mongol generals defeated far superior Russian forces at the battle of Kalka and then pushed on through Russia in the dead of winter, finally reaching Hungary. The conquest of Russia was not to be avenged by the Russian princes for another three hundred years, until Ivan the Terrible captured the Tartar capital of Kazan in 1552. The Tartars were the heirs of the Mongols. It is ironic that, despite untold massacres carried out by the Mongols and the destruction of entire cities, Genghis Khan was a strong protector of trade and the Silk Route between Europe and China across Central Asia. During his lifetime, under a 'pax mongolica' merchants could travel from Korea to the Crimea in absolute security, not least because entire populations had been decimated along the way. The cost of this peace is now estimated to be about 5 million people who were killed by the Mongols. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided Central Asia into two - the khanate ofTransoxiana in the west and Turkestan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to be perhaps the most important and lasting cultural influence in the region.
Taimur, or Tamerlane as he is known in the West, was born in 1336 and did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old. Born south of Samarkand amongst the Barlas Turks, Tamerlane captured most of Turkestan by 1380 and then moved south to Persia and India, west to Russia, and eastward to China. In 1393 he captured Baghdad. Two years later he took Moscow. As he conquered he moved the cream of the vanquished regions' intelligentsia and craftsmen to Samarkand, where he began to build the grandest capital city of ancient Asia. Tamerlane established the Timurid dynasty, and his grandson Ulugh Beg continued his artistic and intellectual traditions, turning Samarkand and Bukhara into the seat of all learning in the decorative arts, architecture, poetry, philosophy, painting and astronomy.
After two thousand years the military machine perfected by the nomads of Central Asia appeared to be finally running its course. Except for slight variations, their weapons had not changed for centuries. The short and powerful bow with which a rider could shoot off dozens of arrows accurately from the saddle, the dagger and small shield remained the same. From around AD 600 the short sword for close-quarters fighting was replaced by a steel sabre. Only in the seventeenth century did the introduction of firearms change the weaponry and tactics of nomadic warfare. The nomads' standard dress of pantaloons, wide at the waist and fitted into knee-high leather boots with a high heel, together with a long shirt, barely changed except for differences of style amongst the various ethnic groups.
A similar dress was adopted by Muslims in India during the Mogul empire. Elaborate saddles and harnesses for the horses made of leather, fur and a felt underlay had become standard by the thirteenth century. With the Huns ruling in central and western Europe, the Goths in Spain and Italy, and the Avars in Hungary, it appeared for a time that the whole world was in the grip of Central Asian nomads. They influenced Eropean military tactics and weapons, and European attitudes to the use of cavalry. Amir Khusrun, a Muslim writer living in India in 1389, gave historians a vivid description of the Mongol army on the move, which was similar to many of the nomadic warrior armies of Central Asia:

There were more than a thousand Tartar infidels and warriors of other tribes, riding on camels, great commanders in battle, all with steel-like bodies clothed in cotton; with faces like fire, with caps of sheep-skin, with their heads shorn. Their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel. Their stink was more horrible than their colour. Their faces were set on their bodies as if they had no necks. Their cheeks resembled soft leather bottles, full of wrinkles and knots.Their noses extended from cheek to cheek, their mouths from cheek bone to cheek bone.Their moustaches were of extravagant length.They had scanty heards around their chins. The King marvelled at their beastly countenances and said that God had created them out of hell-fire.

The Timurid dynasty was to be replaced by a new tribal grouping, the Shaybani Uzbeks. The Uzbeks were of mixed Turkish and Mongol blood and part of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, but they had remained nomads, untouched by the civilizing influences of urban life. Under their dynamic chief Mohammed Shaybani, who was born in 1451, the Uzbeks united other tribes and then defeated the Timurid heir Babar at the decisive battle of Serpul, near Samarkand.
This battle was to change the course of Indian history, for Babar went on to conquer Afghanistan and India and to found the Mogul dynasty in Delhi. In a brief decade, from 1500 to 1510, the Uzbeks defeated the Turkomen and the Persians, thus extending their empire to much of Central Asia and northern Persia.
But Persian power was again on the rise with the coming to power of the Safavids, who ruled from 1501 to 1722 and who changed the state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam - a step that considerably reduced Persia's influence in Central Asia. Persia's main challenge was to contain Ottoman power in Turkey and Uzbek power in the north - the Uzbek chief Mohammed Shaybani was killed in 1510 in battle against the Safavids. In any case the Uzbeks soon broke up into smaller principalities, and the frequent wars of succession amongst them led to the evolution of three khanates, based on the cities of Khiva in the west, Bukhara in the centre and Kokand in the east. With the discovery of the sea route to India, the importance of the Silk Route had declined and, semi-forgotten, Central Asia slipped into a limbo.
Russia had made its opening move eastward as early as 1552 when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan from the Tartars and massacred the entire population. Ivan built Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square to commemorate the victory and topped its domes with onion shapes to symbolize the severed heads of the turbaned Tartars.
The battle and its grim memento was to be etched into Russia's collective memory for ever. As one writer has noted, the only time after 1552 that Russian forces ever retreated in the face of Muslim power was four centuries later in Afghanistan.
Ivan the Terrible swept on in 1556, taking Astrakhan, the strategically important city where the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea. Military expeditions were then mounted beyond the Ural mountains and into Siberia.Within a century, by 1650, the Russians had reached the Pacific, subduing the Siberian khanate along the way. Over the next two centuries the Muslim tribes in Central Asia were rolled back by a Slav crusade.
Peter the Great seized Dagestan, along the Caspian Sea, in 1723, which began a long and bloody war by Russia to conquer the Caucasus, which was to last until 1859 because of the spirited resistance put up by Caucasian guerrilla leaders such as Mullah Shamyl (1797-1871).
By the time Russia could claim that it had complete control of the Caucasus, it had also moved steadily southeastward into present-day Kazakhstan, building forts and roads and making treaties with local chiefs.
By 1750 the Russians had built forts over some 2,500 kilometers from Gurev, on the northern tip of the Caspian Sea, north to Orenburg and then east as far as the Alatau mountains and the town of Ust-Kamenogorsk (see map). Meanwhile the Russians had also expanded southward from the Siberian steppe as far as Lake Balkash. The Kazakhs were the first to be subdued, through a series of treaties with their chiefs between 1731 and 1740, but the three main Kazakh ordas or hordes still provided formidable resistance to Russian settlers.
As with Siberia, the pressure to conquer Central Asia was a mixture of imperial policy, ambition to rule the entire continent east of Moscow, and unrelenting economic pressure from merchants, bankers and Industrialists.The expansion into Siberia was fuelled by the hunger for land, furs or 'soft gold' and the sudden requirement by the Tsar for penal colonies.
In Central Asia, Russian expansion was fuelled by the military-bureaucratic apparatus which suddenly found itself, at the end of the war in the Caucasus, without an enemy to fight. Senior officers of the 200,000-strong Army of the Caucasus lobbied at the Tsar's court for permission to advance eastward.
At the same time, under Tsar Alexander the Second (1855-81), a similar aim was given to foreign policy by Foreign Minister Prince A. Gorchakov. In his first memorandum to the Tsar he wrote that Russia should turn away from Europe and expand its national interest in Asia, even at the price of confronting the British empire.
Merchants had been trading with Central Asia since the time of Peter the Great, and they had already discovered the merits of Central Asian cotton when the American Civil War (1861-65) suddenly cut off American cotton supplies. Merchants demanded that Moscow advance into Central Asia to secure cotton supplies.They increased the yield by importing Russian farmers and more scientific methods of cultivation. The abolition of serfdom in Russia had created a huge potential free peasant class, who wanted land, while Russian industriaIists were anxious to sell their goods to Central Asia. Once the economic and military imperatives had been determined, the court and the intellectual elite produced the necessary moral justification so common to other empire-building states in the colonial era.
Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75), a history professor at Moscow University, became popular for preaching the superiority of the Russian race and its civilizing mission in Asia. Other historians and writers joined him, helpIng to build an intellectual consensus for an aggressive, expansionist IlOlicy on Russia's borders.
The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845 in St. Petersburg and largely manned by retired military officers, used its expeditions to Central Asia to advocate seizing the region. Pyotr Semyonov (1827-1914), vice president of the society and himself an explorer of the Tien Shan range, argued for an expansionist policy on the basis of Russia's need for military security. He was later given the title 'Tyan-Shansky' by the Tsar in recognition of his work in opening up Central Asia.
The Russian Orthodox Church demanded that Russia end the slave trade in Khiva and bring Christianity to a barbaric people. For a time in Moscow everyone believed that it was Russia's manifest destiny to move into Asia and expand the empire.
None other than the great Russian novelist and humanist Feodor Dostoevsky was to write in 1881:

...the Russian is not only a European, but also an Asiatic. Not only that; in our coming destiny, perhaps it is precisely Asia that represents our main way out. In Europe we were hangers-on, whereas to Asia we shall go as masters. In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us thither.

The first expedition to the east had been a disastrous attempt by Peter the Great to conquer Khiva, in 1717, in which an entire Russian army was decimated. Another military expedition, sent out in 1839, also failed, but from then on the Russians followed a more cautious policy.They advanced east along the Syrdarya river building forts and subduing local tribes, and also moved west from the Tien Shan mountains which they had reached from Siberia. The two prongs of this move converged on Chimkent, which was captured in 1864;
Kyzl Orda, the main seat of Kazakh resistance, had fallen in 1853 and Vierny, now Alma Ata, was founded a year later. The Land between the Two Rivers was now encircled from three sides and the Russians moved in to conquer the rich agricultural heartland of Central Asia that comprises modern Uzbekistan.
Military campaigns were mounted to capture Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868: Bukhara became a Russian protectorate. Meanwhile campaigns against the Turkomen in the south resulted in the capture of Khiva in 1873.
Finally Kokand, in the east, fell in 1876.
Russia's advance into Central Asia had been watched with great trepidation by another great colonial power, Britain, which scrambled to try to capture Afghanistan in a bid to hold back what it feared would be a Russian advance on British India.
Thus began the Great Game between Russia and England which was played out over the vast landscapes of Afghanistan, Persia, Xinjiang and Central Asia. Sensing the coming tensions, Russia quickly legitimized its presence in Central Asia.The conqueror of Central Asia and its governor-general from 1867 to 1881, General K.Von Kaufman, signed a peace treaty with the khan of Khiva abolishing slavery and making Khiva a vassal state. A similar treaty was signed with the emir of Bukhara. Britain tried to trump it in neighbouring Xinjiang by signing a friendship treaty with the emir of Kashgar to ensure that the Russians did not try and move further east into Chinese Turkestan.
Russia also legitimized the borders of Central Asia with its new neighbours. In 1860 a Sino-Russian treaty established the border with Xinjiang. This was to divide permanently the ethnic groups that spanned that border: the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uighurs and others.
Russia neutralized the Persians by signing a peace treaty with Teheran in 1881, after the Russian army had defeated the Turkomen. In 1887 Russia began a long series of demarcations of the Afghan border with the British, to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer zone between the two Imperial powers.
The rivalry between the two had intensified after Moscow began laying tracks for the first railway lines in Central Asia, which in twenty years were to traverse the whole region.
The strategic 1,400-kilometre railway line from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand was completed in 1888 after its creators had overcome the enormous problems of building a track in waterless deserts.When the railway line reached Merv and then Kushk on the Afghan border, Russia was only 112 kilometres from Herat in western Afghanistan, which created near-panic in London and Delhi. Russian hawks insisted that a track be laid to Herat while British hawks managed to persuade their government to take the British railway line up the Khyber and Bolan passes in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan to the border with Afghanistan. British military historian Major-General Henry Rawlinson saw Russia advancing towards India 'like an army investing a fortress', and when news leaked that the Russian general M. D. Skobelegv had put forward a plan to the Tsar to Invade India through Afghanistan with just 15,000 men, there was consternation in the British Parliament and in the press.
The pressure from the British in India ensured that Moscow quickly Integrated Central Asia into the Russian empire. Within a few years Central Asia had become a cotton-growing colony for the textile mill owners in Moscow and a virgin market for manufacturers of Russian consumer goods.
It was a vast dumping ground for unwanted Russian firm labour, former serfs and political dissidents as well as a playground for adventure-seeking soldiers, priests, explorers and mountain climbers.
Unlike the British or French colonists, the Russian empire-builders had no seas to cross and no natural barriers to block their absorption of Central Asia. There was no organized state power In the region to hinder their advance and no foreign competition to Interfere with their economic exploitation of the region.
Russia had the vast steppes of Central Asia all to itself. By merely controlling the great navigable rivers and key mountain passes and by building railways, Russian access and political control were assured. Geography had given Russia a vast new hinterland that had incalculable natural resources and unparalleled strategic military depth.
Many Russians and a significant school of thought in England led by Sir Halford Mackinder, the founding father of geopolitics, viewed Central Asia in much the same way as the Mongol hordes did: that Central Asia was the centre of the world. 'It is the greatest natural fortress in the world defended by polar ice caps, deserts, arid tableland and mountain ranges. It was the largest landmass in the world and whoever controlled it exercised enormous power because they were not dependent on sea power.
It was the centre of political gravity because it enclosed more frontiers than any other region in the world - those of India, China, Europe and the Middle East. Although overstated, these were appealing notions for Russian and English strategists, who pushed for their respective expansionist policies in Central Asia. This debate about the 'heartland' was only vindicated during World War Two, when Central Asia gave enormous depth and space to Russia's defence and allowed the country to recover industrially from the fury of the German blitzkrieg.
However, like all usurping powers Russia faced unrelenting resistance from the people. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads periodically rose in revolt against the new Russian farm owners who were seizing their grazing grounds. Revolts were crushed by the army and thousands of nomads were killed; many fled to China to escape persecution.
The Turkomen continued a hit-and-run guerrilla war in the desert that continued unabated until the 1930s.
The Tajiks and the Uzbeks under various political guises - first Pan-Turkism and then Pan-Islamism - resisted the Tsar's policies just as fiercely.
The history of this resistance, which is described in much greater detail later in our discource, was studiously ignored by first tsarist and then Bolshevik historians. The collective memory of this resistance is now playing a major role in shaping the future of the newly independent republics. The brutal repression and exploitation by Russia, which in arable areas led to the cultivation of cotton replacing all major food crops, plunged Central Asia into a grave economic crisis.
When on 25 June 1916 the Tsar ordered the mass mobilization of Central Asian manpower between the ages of nineteen and forty-three to carry out labour duties in the rear of the Russian army that was locked in battle with Germany, this simple edict was all that was need for a generalized revolt. Within a few months Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads were waging an all-out guerrilla war against the Russian army. But without coherent leadership and common goals, and with vast distances to be covered to maintain communications, the revolts were suppressed - with great bloodshed, the slaughter of entire villages and the hanging and forced deportation of thousands of rebels north to Siberia.
Nevertheless the political divide between Russia and Central Asia had grown enormously in the process and a new local leadership of intellectuals, tribal chiefs and merchants formed new parties and military organizations across the region. Prevalent amongst them was the desire for independence, not just from tsarism but from Russia itself.
Russian colonialism had led to an intellectual revival amongst Muslims, especially in the cities of present-day Uzbekistan.
Fierce debates erupted between those who believed in a purely Islamic revival in Central Asia and those who believed in an independent united Turkestan under a Pan-Turkic nationalist leadership.
Others, particularly Tartar intellectuals, were sympathetic to a socialist revolution, which they hoped would not only do away with Russian oppression but also rid their own societies of feudal and tribal elites.
At the heart of these debates was the reformist Jadid movement, begun in 1883 by the Crimean Tartar Ismail Gasprinsky and later led by Uzbek and Tartar intellectuals. The Jadids believed that only by modernizing Islam, spreading education and allowing greater freedom to women could Central Asian Muslims combat growing Russian influence and shape their own future.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917 there was considerable hope in Central Asia that Lenin's promises of self-determination meant that Russia would now grant either full independence to Central Asia or at least much greater autonomy. In Lenin's first appeal to the 'Muslims of Russia and the East' on 5 December 1917, he linked the Bolshevik programme, particularly the right of selfdetermination, to the revolt in Central Asia against tsarism. But the Bolsheviks' real attention was directed to Europe, where they believed the incipient insurrection in Berlin would quickly engulf Europe in revolution. Only in late 1918 did Stalin write the first articles in Pravda focusing attention on the revolutionary potential of Central Asia, which could help consolidate the Bolsheviks. A Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, or 'Narkomnats', headed by Stalin had been created in November 1917, but it had failed to address Muslim nationalist feeling in Central Asia. Only after the hopes of revolution in Europe had diminished did Moscow create the All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations in the winter of 1918-19 to direct the developing civil war in Turkestan.
Tashkent, a city with a population of 200,000 Muslims and some 50,000 Russian settlers, was the centre of Turkestan's political life. Russian workers and soldiers overthrew the Provisional Government on 31 October 1917 (Julian calendar) and established the first soviet in Central Asia, but local Muslims were not invited to join it. They held a separate Muslim Congress which demanded autonomy for Central Asia but was ignored by the Tashkent Soviet. Muslim leaders then held an important congress in Kokand in December 1917 and announced the formation of the Provisional Autonomous Government of Turkestan, which would seek independence from Russia. Thus within a few months two centres of power had emerged, the wholly Russian and communist centre in Tashkent, and the Muslim and clearly nationalist Turkic centre at Kokand. Ethnic and religious differences had already divided Central Asia. In February 1918 Kokand was attacked by troops of the Tashkent Soviet, who slaughtered the city's inhabitants. The direct result of this brutal assault on the aspirations of Central Asian Muslims was the creation of the Basmachi Muslim rebel movement.
The Basmachis were local guerrilla groups led by mullahs, tribal chiefs and landlords who resisted Soviet rule across the whole of Central Asia and sustained their unequal struggle until the 1930s. By 1919 there were some forty Basmachi groups with some 20,000 fighters strung across the steppe from Ashkhabad to Ferghana and Dushanbe. Lenin's appeals to local Russian communists to be more sensitive to Muslim demands, such as his June 1920 appeal 'On Our Tasks in Turkestan', were ignored. As well as joining the Basmachis, Turkic nomads also joined the White armies in great numbers. By ignoring Muslim demands, the Bolsheviks gave the White armies, now fighting the Reds across much of Central Asia, a major recruiting base.
But the White generals, helped for a time by a dozen foreign countries who wanted to see Bolshevism destroyed, failed to capitalize on this support because their slogan, 'Russia one and indivisible', alienated the Central Asian Muslims and their dream of independence. By 1920 the Civil War was largely won - because tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers crossed lines and joined the Red Army after being appalled by White Russian attitudes and atrocities.These Muslim troops believed that the new communist era promised greater freedom and development for Central Asia. It was a hope that was to be dashed within months of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power.

[MSylvain59] likes to tear down old surplus, and in the video below, he takes apart a German transceiver known as a U-600M. From the outside, it looks like an unremarkable gray box, especially since it is supposed to work with a remote unit, so there’s very little on the outside other than connectors. Inside, though, there’s plenty to see and even a few surprises.

Inside is a neatly built RF circuit with obviously shielded compartments. In addition to a configurable power supply, the radio has modules that allow configuration to different frequencies. One of the odder components is a large metal cylinder marked MF450-1900. This appears to be a mechanical filter. There are also a number of unusual parts like dogbone capacitors and tons of trimmer capacitors.

The plug-in modules are especially dense and interesting. In particular, some of the boards are different from some of the others. It is an interesting design from a time predating broadband digital synthesis techniques.

While this transceiver is stuffed with parts, it probably performs quite well. However, transceivers can be simple. Even more so if you throw in an SDR chip.

youtube.com/embed/tw9qxqWB9SM?…

hackaday.com/2025/03/08/transc…

Dalla puntata odierna di "Fuori da qui", di cui trovate il link qui sotto, ho capito molte cose.

Ho capito che se il lato evidente dei dazi di Trump è che siano una cosa anacronistica e al di fuori della realtà, ci sono purtroppo tante cose che, almeno io, non avevo capito in maniera chiara, soprattutto nelle loro conseguenze.

Il genio (del male) ha deciso di applicare i dazi non soltanto alle merci cinesi, ma anche alle navi cinesi. Logico? Ovvio? Certo.

Quello che è meno ovvio è che ha deciso di applicare i dazi anche alle navi che attraccano nei porti e che sono state costruite in Cina, a prescindere dalla loro nazione di provenienza.

Ve lo dico in un altro modo: una nave italiana fabbricata in Cina subirà dazi esorbitanti se attraccherà (ad esempio) a Boston.

Capite ora la portata del problema? Unite i dazi al fatto che l'80% di quello che avete nella vostra casa arriva a noi via mare perché ci sono compagnie anche grandi che fanno questo mestiere, e che per via di questi dazi potrebbero non essere più in grado di farlo.

Sono paranoico? Può darsi, ma qui è a rischio tutta la produzione mondiale, con un effetto domino che faccio fatica a capire perché si voglia innestare.

open.spotify.com/episode/01PRR…

In the early 2000s, the idea that you could write programs on microcontrollers that did things in the physical world, like run motors or light up LEDs, was kind of new. At the time, most people thought of coding as stuff that stayed on the screen, or in cyberspace. This idea of writing code for physical gadgets was uncommon enough that it had a buzzword of its own: “physical computing”.

You never hear much about “physical computing” these days, but that’s not because the concept went away. Rather, it’s probably because it’s almost become the norm. I realized this as Tom Nardi and I were talking on the podcast about a number of apparently different trends that all point in the same direction.

We started off talking about the early days of the Arduino revolution. Sure, folks have been building hobby projects with microcontrollers built in before Arduino, but the combination of a standardized board, a wide-ranging software library, and abundant examples to learn from brought embedded programming to a much wider audience. And particularly, it brought this to an audience of beginners who were not only blinking an LED for the first time, but maybe even taking their first steps into coding. For many, the Arduino hello world was their coding hello world as well. These folks are “physical computing” natives.

Now, it’s to the point that when Arya goes to visit FOSDEM, an open-source software convention, there is hardware everywhere. Why? Because many successful software projects support open hardware, and many others run on it. People port their favorite programming languages to microcontroller platforms, and as they become more powerful, the lines between the “big” computers and the “micro” ones starts to blur.

And I think this is awesome. For one, it’s somehow more rewarding, when you’re just starting to learn to code, to see the letters you type cause something in the physical world to happen, even if it’s just blinking an LED. At the same time, everything has a microcontroller in it these days, and hacking on these devices is also another flavor of physical computing – there’s code in everything that you might think of as hardware. And with open licenses, everything being under version control, and more openness in open hardware than we’ve ever seen before, the open-source hardware world reflects the open-source software ethos.

Are we getting past the point where the hardware / software distinction is even worth making? And was “physical computing” just the buzzword for the final stages of blurring out those lines?

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

hackaday.com/2025/03/08/physic…

Il robot, che solitamente serve gli aerei militari in località remote degli Stati Uniti, una sera ha cambiato il suo solito lavoro per esibirsi in un nightclub di San Francisco. L’umanoide Phantom del Foundation Robotics Lab ha preso il controllo della postazione del DJ al Temple Nightclub. E persino per una città in cui le innovazioni tecnologiche sono da tempo all’ordine del giorno, questo evento è stato una sorpresa assoluta.

Al GigaParty la musica tech house per una notte è stata sotto la direzione di Phantom. Gli organizzatori hanno ideato un concetto ambizioso per l’evento: secondo il loro piano, la festa avrebbe dovuto riflettere tutto il progresso tecnologico dei primi 25 anni del XXI secolo e mostrare le prospettive di sviluppo del nostro mondo fino alla fine del secolo. Il robot DJ si adattava perfettamente all’idea. Gli ospiti hanno pagato tra i 35 e i 3.000 dollari per avere l’opportunità di assistere a questo insolito spettacolo e, a quanto pare, non hanno risparmiato denaro, anche se l’evento in sé si è rivelato più simile a un pomposo incontro di lavoro che a una vera festa.

Gli ingegneri trattano Phantom come una persona, e usano addirittura il pronome “lui” per chiamarlo così. Dietro lo sviluppo c’è il co-fondatore dell’azienda, Mike LeBlanc, che ha prestato servizio per 13 anni nel Corpo dei Marines. Secondo lui, diversi robot della serie Phantom sono già in servizio presso l’esercito americano. Nella vita di tutti i giorni eseguono la manutenzione e il rifornimento di carburante degli aerei in luoghi difficili da raggiungere. A differenza della semplice automazione, la loro forma umanoide consente loro di interagire con apparecchiature complesse destinate agli esseri umani.

Foundation Robotics Lab è l’unica azienda negli Stati Uniti che sviluppa specificamente robot umanoidi per uso militare. Questa è la loro differenza fondamentale rispetto agli altri produttori: ad esempio, Boston Dynamics proibisce categoricamente l’uso militare dei suoi prodotti. “Abbiamo scelto la strada opposta”, spiega LeBlanc. “Crediamo che i robot umanoidi saranno parte integrante delle future operazioni militari. Ecco perché li stiamo rendendo più grandi, più potenti e più veloci degli umani”.

Sebbene il Ministero della Difesa sia il cliente principale della Fondazione, i veicoli non sono ancora impiegati in operazioni di combattimento. Sanno come maneggiare attrezzature complesse, lavorare in condizioni pericolose e raggiungere luoghi in cui è difficile o impossibile per le persone arrivare.

Una serata di musica elettronica al club segna una svolta decisiva nella carriera di Phantom. Leblanc la chiama “diplomazia culturale”: “Non cercheremo scuse per il fatto che i nostri sviluppi siano così potenti”, afferma. – Ecco perché per noi questo è un debutto ideale: mostriamo il robot così com’è. Fate vedere a tutti che non solo può lavorare, ma anche divertirsi.”

L'articolo Dagli Aerei Militari al Party: La Tech House del Futuro è Qui Con Il Robot Phantom proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

I ricercatori di Kaspersky Lab hanno presentato il loro rapporto annuale Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response (MDR) per il 2024. Fornisce un’analisi dettagliata delle tattiche, delle tecniche e degli strumenti degli aggressori, nonché delle principali tendenze da loro identificati.

L’analisi dei dati ha mostrato che i principali obiettivi degli attacchi sono le imprese industriali (25,7%), le organizzazioni finanziarie (14,1%) e le agenzie governative (11,7%). Tuttavia, nella categoria leader in termini di elevata criticità sono le aziende IT (22,8%), le agenzie governative (18,3%) e l’industria (17,8%). Ogni giorno si sono registrati più di due incidenti di elevata criticità.

Nell’ultimo anno, il numero di incidenti di elevata gravità è diminuito del 34%, ma il tempo medio impiegato per le indagini è aumentato del 48%. Ciò indica un aumento della complessità degli attacchi. Nella maggior parte dei casi, il rilevamento è stato effettuato utilizzando strumenti XDR specializzati, mentre in precedenza i registri di sistema operativo svolgevano un ruolo importante.

Il numero di attacchi mirati condotti dall’uomo continua ad aumentare. Nel 2024, la loro quota tra gli incidenti ad alta criticità è aumentata del 74% rispetto al 2023. Sebbene gli strumenti di protezione automatizzati stiano migliorando, gli aggressori stanno trovando modi per aggirare i meccanismi di rilevamento. Per combattere tali minacce sono necessarie tecniche di rilevamento avanzate e analisti SOC esperti.

I metodi Living off the Land (LotL) continuano a essere i più utilizzati attivamente.

Gli aggressori spesso utilizzano gli strumenti standard del sistema operativo per muoversi furtivamente nella rete. Un numero significativo di incidenti riguarda modifiche non autorizzate alla configurazione, come l’aggiunta di utenti a gruppi privilegiati. Il controllo delle modifiche e la gestione degli accessi svolgono un ruolo importante nel mitigare il rischio di tali attacchi.

Gli attacchi di phishing restano tra le minacce più diffuse. Il fattore umano continua a essere un anello debole della sicurezza informatica, il che evidenzia l’importanza dei programmi di sensibilizzazione dei dipendenti.

L'articolo Cyber Minacce 2024 di Kaspersky: Nessuna AI! L’Uomo è ancora al centro nella Cybersecurity proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most recent discoveries is that it contains a complex circuit — containing around 9,000 transistors — whose sole purpose is to multiply specifically by three. Why does such an apparently simple operation require such a complex circuit? And why this particular operation, and not something else?

Let’s back up a little to put this all into context. One of the feathers in the Pentium’s cap was its Floating Point Unit (FPU) which was capable of much faster floating point operations than any of its predecessors. [Ken] dove into reverse-engineering the FPU earlier this year and a close-up look at the Pentium’s silicon die shows that the FPU occupies a significant chunk of it. Of the FPU, nearly half is dedicated to performing multiplications and a comparatively small but quite significant section of that is specifically for multiplying a number by three. [Ken] calls it the x3 circuit.
The “x3 circuit”, a nontrivial portion of the Pentium processor, is dedicated to multiplying a number by exactly three and contains more transistors than an entire Z80 microprocessor.
Why does the multiplier section of the FPU in the Pentium processor have such specialized (and complex) functionality for such an apparently simple operation? It comes down to how the Pentium multiplies numbers.

Multiplying two 64-bit numbers is done in base-8 (octal), which ultimately requires fewer operations than doing so in base-2 (binary). Instead of handling each bit separately (as in binary multiplication), three bits of the multiplier get handled at a time, requiring fewer shifts and additions overall. But the downside is that multiplying by three must be handled as a special case.

[Ken] gives an excellent explanation of exactly how all that works (which is also an explanation of the radix-8 Booth’s algorithm) but it boils down to this: there are numerous shortcuts for multiplying numbers (multiplying by two is the same as shifting left by 1 bit, for example) but multiplying by three is the only one that doesn’t have a tidy shortcut. In addition, because the result of multiplying by three is involved in numerous other shortcuts (x5 is really x8 minus x3 for example) it must also be done very quickly to avoid dragging down those other operations. Straightforward binary multiplication is too slow. Hence the reason for giving it so much dedicated attention.

[Ken] goes into considerable detail on how exactly this is done, and it involves carry lookaheads as a key element to saving time. He also points out that this specific piece of functionality used more transistors than an entire Z80 microprocessor. And if that is not a wild enough idea for you, then how about the fact that the Z80 has a new OS available?

hackaday.com/2025/03/08/the-pe…

In una indagine di Safe{Wallet} e Mandiant rivelano nuovi dettagli sul più grande furto di criptovalute della storia: Furto di quasi 1,5 miliardi di dollari dall’exchange ByBit è stato realizzato dal gruppo nordcoreano TraderTraitor. Gli hacker hanno sfruttato una vulnerabilità presente su uno dei computer portatili degli sviluppatori e hanno aggirato i sistemi di sicurezza.

Gli hacker hanno compromesso il MacBook di uno degli sviluppatori di Safe{Wallet}, ottenendo da esso token di sessione AWS, che hanno consentito loro di aggirare l’autenticazione a più fattori e di accedere all’infrastruttura. Lo sviluppatore disponeva degli elevati privilegi richiesti per lavorare con il codice ByBit. Successivamente gli aggressori hanno rimosso il malware e cancellato la cronologia di Bash per nascondere le tracce dell’intrusione.

L’infezione si è verificata il 4 febbraio 2025, quando è stata effettuata una connessione al sito web getstockprice.com tramite un progetto in esecuzione in Docker . Sebbene il progetto non fosse più presente nel sistema al momento dell’analisi, tracce di file nella directory ~/Downloads/ indicano l’utilizzo di metodi di ingegneria sociale.

Gli hacker hanno utilizzato anche ExpressVPN per accedere all’account AWS dello sviluppatore. I criminali informatici hanno sincronizzato la loro attività con i suoi impegni lavorativi, utilizzando token di sessione attive rubati. Il gruppo TraderTraitor si sovrappone ad un altro gruppo nordcoreano, APT38 (BlueNoroff, Stardust Chollima), che a sua volta è parte del più ampio gruppo di hacker nazionali di Lazarus.

Nonostante la complessità dell’attacco, gli smart contract di Safe sono rimasti inalterati. Tuttavia, la società ha effettuato un’analisi completa dei sistemi, rafforzando notevolmente i meccanismi di difesa. Le misure adottate includono un riavvio completo dell’infrastruttura con rotazione di tutte le credenziali, la chiusura dell’accesso esterno ai servizi, sistemi migliorati per il rilevamento di transazioni dannose e strumenti aggiuntivi per la verifica delle transazioni firmate.

Inoltre, Safe{Wallet} ha temporaneamente disabilitato il supporto nativo per i portafogli hardware, poiché questi dipendevano dalla funzione vulnerabile eth_sign e da servizi di terze parti. Agli utenti viene fornito uno strumento speciale per controllare le transazioni. Sono inoltre in corso i lavori per consentire l’utilizzo di Safe{Wallet} sulla piattaforma IPFS, il che garantirà un ulteriore livello di sicurezza.

Safe ha sottolineato che per migliorare la sicurezza sono necessari strumenti migliori per rilevare e prevenire gli attacchi. Secondo gli esperti, la sicurezza delle transazioni in criptovaluta dovrebbe essere semplificata migliorando l’esperienza dell’utente, il che aiuterà il grande pubblico a ridurre al minimo i rischi.

L'articolo Un trojan su un Apple MacBook è stato il punto debole del più grosso colpo del secolo! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Se oggi avete solo 10 minuti da dedicare all'informazione, vi consiglio questo articolo.

Valigia Blu

2025-03-08 08:24:43

🧵 Per contrastare le oligarchie una patrimoniale serve, ma non basta | @marastimattia valigiablu.it/patrimoniale-fra… via @valigiablu

Per contrastare le oligarchie una patrimoniale serve, ma non basta - Valigia Blu

Sta facendo discutere in Francia la reintroduzione di una tassa patrimoniale per rispondere alla concentrazione delle ricchezze nelle mani di poche persone.

^{Mattia Marasti (Valigia Blu)}

Eehhh finalmente arriva un sabato, IL sabato, dopo una settimana intensa di radioterapia, di viaggi avanti e indietro dall'ospedale, di cambio di catetere, di iniezioni per la cura di ormoni.

Appuntamenti pe l'affitto del locale, una serata di Burger ( indimenticabile!!!!!), clisteri ogni giorno, Il sabato, questo giorno è una vera e propria manna dal cielo.

Sto pascendomi del sole, della musica, di noia e di relax.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Meshtastic lately, and with good reason. The low-power LoRa-based network has a ton of interesting use cases, and as with any mesh network, the more nodes there are, the better it works for everyone. That’s why we’re excited by this super-affordable Meshtastic kit that lets you get a node on the air for about ten bucks.

The diminutive kit, which consists of a microcontroller and a LoRa module, has actually been available from the usual outlets for a while. But [concretedog] has been deep in the Meshtastic weeds lately, and decided to review its pros and cons. Setup starts with flashing Meshtastic to the XIAO ESP32-S3 microcontroller and connecting the included BLE antenna. After that, the Wio-SX1262 LoRa module is snapped to the microcontroller board via surface-mount connectors, and a separate LoRa antenna is connected. Flash the firmware (this combo is supported by the official web flasher), and you’re good to go.

What do you do with your new node? That’s largely up to you, of course. Most Meshtastic users seem content to send encrypted text messages back and forth, but as our own [Jonathan Bennett] notes, a Meshtastic network could be extremely useful for emergency preparedness. Build a few of these nodes, slap them in a 3D printed box, distribute them to willing neighbors, and suddenly you’ve got a way to keep connected in an emergency, no license required.

hackaday.com/2025/03/08/get-in…

Negli ultimi giorni, il panorama della cybersecurity italiana è stato scosso da una serie di massicci data leak che hanno esposto centinaia di migliaia di informazioni sensibili di cittadini e aziende italiane. Secondo quanto riportato dalla piattaforma Recorded Future, un totale di 464.508 record compromessi è stato individuato su diversi forum del dark web, mettendo in evidenza un’escalation preoccupante delle minacce informatiche rivolte al nostro Paese.

L’origine dei dati trafugati e le piattaforme coinvolte

Le informazioni compromesse sono emerse da forum specializzati e mercati clandestini del dark web, tra cui BreachForums2, NoHide Forum, CrdPro ed Exploit Forum, noti per essere punti di incontro per hacker e cybercriminali che vendono e scambiano dati sottratti.

Secondo i report di Recorded Future, nei giorni 1 e 2 marzo 2025 sono stati pubblicati i seguenti dataset:

• 300.000 record su BreachForums2 (1 marzo)
• 140.000 record su NoHide Forum (2 marzo)
• 15.198 record su CrdPro (1 marzo)
• 9.310 record su CrdPro (2 marzo)

L’elemento più inquietante è il tasso di validità dell’85% associato a questi dati, che suggerisce che la maggior parte delle informazioni rubate è ancora utilizzabile per attività illecite, come il furto d’identità, frodi finanziarie e attacchi informatici mirati.

Quali dati sono stati esposti?

L’analisi dei database compromessi rivela una vasta gamma di informazioni personali e finanziarie, suddivise in diverse categorie di dati sensibili:

• Credential Leaks: Sono state trovate enormi raccolte di email e password associate a servizi di posta elettronica, social network e piattaforme aziendali. Particolarmente preoccupante è la presenza di un dataset denominato “Yahoo EmailPass HQ Combolist”, che suggerisce una compromissione mirata degli account Yahoo italiani.
• Combolists: I cosiddetti “combolists” sono raccolte di credenziali email-password di alta qualità, spesso utilizzate per attacchi di credential stuffing, ovvero tentativi automatici di accesso ad account online sfruttando combinazioni precedentemente esposte in altre violazioni.
• Fullz Information: Si tratta di dati personali completi, tra cui nomi, indirizzi, numeri di telefono, email, numeri di carte di credito e altre informazioni finanziarie. La vendita di questi dati su forum del dark web indica un forte interesse da parte dei cybercriminali per il furto d’identità e le frodi economiche.
• Proxy e SOCKS5 italiani: In alcuni marketplace underground sono apparsi elenchi di IP italiani compromessi, venduti come proxy per attività di anonimizzazione e attacchi informatici che simulano traffico proveniente dall’Italia. Questi strumenti vengono spesso utilizzati per bypassare controlli antifrode o per lanciare attacchi informatici da una posizione apparentemente legittima.
• Yahoo Email Credentials: Un altro dato rilevante è l’esistenza di elenchi specifici di credenziali appartenenti a utenti Yahoo italiani, segno che il provider è stato particolarmente preso di mira in questa ondata di violazioni.

La diversità e l’ampiezza delle informazioni esposte dimostrano come l’ecosistema criminale del dark web sia sempre più specializzato nella raccolta e monetizzazione dei dati personali.

Le implicazioni per la cybersecurity italiana

Questi eventi sottolineano come l’Italia sia diventata un obiettivo privilegiato per gli attacchi informatici e il commercio illegale di dati. L’attuale situazione evidenzia alcune criticità fondamentali:

• Scarsa consapevolezza sulla sicurezza digitale: Il numero elevato di credenziali compromesse suggerisce che molti utenti continuano a utilizzare password deboli e ripetute su più servizi, senza adottare meccanismi di protezione avanzati come l’autenticazione a due fattori (2FA).
• Aumento degli attacchi di credential stuffing: La disponibilità di combolists aggiornate consente ai cybercriminali di testare automaticamente credenziali su vari servizi online, aumentando il rischio di accessi non autorizzati e furti di dati aziendali e personali.
• Espansione del mercato nero dei proxy italiani: La vendita di proxy e SOCKS5 con IP italiani suggerisce un forte interesse nel mascherare attività fraudolente simulando connessioni da indirizzi riconosciuti come affidabili dalle infrastrutture di sicurezza.

Quale sarà il prossimo passo?

Se questa tendenza dovesse continuare, l’Italia potrebbe affrontare una crescente ondata di attacchi informatici mirati, con implicazioni sia per i cittadini che per le aziende. Alcuni possibili sviluppi includono:

• Attacchi di phishing altamente personalizzati: Con così tante informazioni personali disponibili, i criminali potrebbero orchestrare campagne di phishing più credibili e difficili da riconoscere.
• Frode finanziaria e furto d’identità: I dataset contenenti dati finanziari possono essere utilizzati per prelievi fraudolenti, acquisti online non autorizzati o schemi di social engineering per accedere a conti bancari.
• Compromissione di infrastrutture aziendali: La presenza di credenziali aziendali nei database esposti potrebbe facilitare attacchi ransomware o intrusioni mirate nei sistemi informatici di imprese italiane.

Come proteggersi?

Alla luce di questi eventi, è essenziale adottare una serie di misure per ridurre l’impatto delle violazioni e prevenire future compromissioni:

• Attivare l’autenticazione a due fattori (2FA) su tutti i servizi critici, impedendo accessi non autorizzati anche in caso di compromissione delle password.
• Monitorare il dark web attraverso servizi specializzati per individuare in tempo reale la presenza delle proprie credenziali in eventuali data leak.
• Cambiare regolarmente le password e utilizzare password manager per generare credenziali complesse e uniche per ogni servizio.
• Eseguire reset periodici delle credenziali aziendali e adottare soluzioni di sicurezza avanzate per proteggere gli asset aziendali.
• Sensibilizzare dipendenti e cittadini sull’importanza della cybersecurity e delle buone pratiche di sicurezza digitale.

La recente ondata di data leak è un chiaro segnale di allarme per l’Italia: la sicurezza digitale deve diventare una priorità per tutti, dalle aziende ai singoli utenti. La protezione delle informazioni personali e aziendali non può più essere sottovalutata. Solo attraverso un’azione congiunta di formazione, prevenzione e tecnologie avanzate si potrà limitare l’impatto di queste minacce e proteggere il futuro digitale del nostro Paese.

Continueremo a monitorare la situazione e a fornire aggiornamenti su Red Hot Cyber per mantenere alta l’attenzione su queste gravi minacce emergenti.

L'articolo Italiani Nel Mirino: 464.508 Record Compromessi nei Forum underground in 2 giorni proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Un utente con il nickname adispystore ha pubblicato un annuncio su un noto forum underground, offrendo presunti servizi remoti e report d’esame per diverse certificazioni di sicurezza informatica, tra cui OSCP, OSEP, OSWE, CRTP e CRTE.

L’inserzione offre i seguenti servizi:

• OSCP: Servizi di supporto remoto durante l’esame con un metodo dichiarato “non rilevabile”.
• HTB CPTS e CBBH: Report d’esame e assistenza remota.
• CRTE e CRTP: Supporto su Discord durante l’esame.
• CRTO: Servizi di esame remoto.
• OSWE Exam Report: Fornitura del codice sorgente, exploit RCE e report dettagliato sugli ambienti Akount e Soapbx.
• OSEP Exam Writeup (14 flag) – Febbraio 2025: Disponibilità di prove a supporto.

L’utente dichiara di trattare esclusivamente su Discord con il nome adispy e avverte di non essere responsabile per eventuali transazioni effettuate con contatti che si spacciano per lui.

Le certificazioni coinvolte

Le certificazioni offerte in questo annuncio sono altamente tecniche e riconosciute nel settore della cybersecurity. Ecco una panoramica:

• OSCP+ (Offensive Security Certified Professional Plus) attesta non solo l’esperienza in sicurezza informatica, ma indica anche che il professionista è aggiornato con gli ultimi standard e pratiche del settore. La designazione “+” sottolinea l’impegno per l’apprendimento continuo. Se non si mantiene il “+” attraverso formazione continua, il titolare conserva comunque l’OSCP, una certificazione pratica e tecnica che richiede di attaccare e penetrare macchine live in un ambiente controllato, utilizzando gli strumenti di Kali Linux.
• HTB CPTS (Hack The Box Certified Penetration Testing Specialist): Certificazione di Hack The Box che valida competenze intermedie nel penetration testing, incluse tecniche avanzate di exploitation, privilege escalation e reportistica.
• HTB CBBH (Hack The Box Certified Bug Bounty Hunter): Certificazione di Hack The Box specializzata nel bug bounty hunting e sicurezza web, con enfasi su vulnerabilità complesse in applicazioni e API.’esame testa la capacità di individuare e sfruttare vulnerabilità complesse in applicazioni web e API.
• OSEP (OffSec Experienced Penetration Tester): Certificazione avanzata di Offensive Security che attesta competenze elevate nel penetration testing contro ambienti protetti. Copre tecniche di evasione di sicurezza, bypass di antivirus ed EDR, attacchi avanzati a reti Windows e Active Directory. L’ottenimento della OSEP distingue i professionisti esperti nella simulazione di attacchi sofisticati, rendendoli altamente ricercati nella cybersecurity offensiva.
• OSWE (Offensive Security Web Expert): Certificazione di OffSec focalizzata sulla sicurezza avanzata delle applicazioni web. Valida le competenze nel test di penetrazione web, nell’elusione delle difese e nella creazione di exploit personalizzati per vulnerabilità critiche. I professionisti certificati OSWE sono altamente qualificati nella protezione delle organizzazioni dalle minacce web.
• CRTP (Certified Red Team Professional): Certificazione focalizzata su tecniche di Red Teaming per principianti, che copre attacchi su infrastrutture Windows Active Directory, come privilege escalation e lateral movement, emulando le tattiche di attori APT.
• CRTE (Certified Red Team Expert): Certificazione avanzata per professionisti esperti nel Red Teaming. Si concentra su simulazioni di attacchi complessi e avanzati contro infrastrutture aziendali, emulando le TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) di attori APT, con enfasi su attacchi sofisticati e la gestione di ambienti complessi.
• CRTO (Certified Red Team Operator): Certificazione che insegna strategie avanzate di Red Teaming. Focalizzata sulla simulazione di minacce persistenti avanzate (APTs), l’operatore acquisisce competenze nella valutazione delle difese organizzative e nell’utilizzo di strumenti e metodologie per esercizi di Red Teaming efficaci. Inoltre, enfatizza la collaborazione con i Blue Team per migliorare la postura di sicurezza complessiva.

Metodi di cheating avanzati

L’annuncio menziona l’utilizzo di metodi “non rilevabili” per il supporto remoto agli esami. Questo potrebbe indicare l’impiego di tecniche sofisticate come:

• Remote Access Trojan (RAT): Malware per controllare a distanza il sistema dell’esaminando senza essere rilevato.
• Virtual Machine Escaping: Uso di ambienti virtuali per eludere i controlli di sicurezza.
• Obfuscation e Anti-Detection: Tecniche per nascondere attività sospette e sfuggire ai sistemi di monitoraggio.
• e altro ancora

Questo caso rappresenta un tentativo di frode accademica su larga scala. L’acquisto di report d’esame o l’uso di assistenza remota durante i test non solo viola le regole delle certificazioni, ma comporta anche rischi come:

• Compromissione dell’integrità professionale: Chi ottiene una certificazione in modo fraudolento potrebbe non avere le competenze richieste, creando problemi nel settore della sicurezza informatica.
• Rischi legali: Essere scoperti nell’uso di questi servizi può portare alla revoca della certificazione e conseguenze legali.
• Esposizione a truffe: Molti venditori su forum underground potrebbero essere truffatori, rubando denaro senza fornire alcun servizio.

Conclusioni e monitoraggio

Attualmente, non possiamo confermare l’autenticità della notizia. Le informazioni riportate provengono da fonti pubbliche accessibili su forum underground e vanno interpretate come una fonte di intelligence, non come una conferma definitiva.

RHC monitorerà l’evoluzione della vicenda per fornire eventuali aggiornamenti sul blog. Chiunque abbia informazioni aggiuntive può contattarci in forma anonima tramite la nostra mail crittografata per whistleblower.

L'articolo Hacker criminali per Hacker etici: il mercato nero delle certificazioni falsificate proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.