Getting a robot to stand on two wheels without tipping over involves a challenging dance with the laws of physics. Self-balancing robots are a great way to get into control systems, sensor fusion, and embedded programming. This build by [mircemk] shows how to make one with just a few common components, an Arduino, and a bit of patience fine-tuning the PID controller.

At the heart of the bot is the MPU6050 – a combo accelerometer/gyroscope sensor that keeps track of tilt and movement. An Arduino Uno takes this data, runs it through a PID loop, and commands an L298N motor driver to adjust the speed and direction of two DC motors. The power comes from two Li-ion batteries feeding everything with enough juice to keep it upright. The rest of the magic lies in the tuning.

PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control is what makes the robot stay balanced. Kp (proportional gain) determines how aggressively the motors respond to tilting. Kd (derivative gain) dampens oscillations, and Ki (integral gain) helps correct slow drifts. Set them wrong, and your bot either wobbles like a confused penguin or falls flat on its face. A good trick is to start with only Kp, then slowly add Kd and Ki until it stabilizes. Then don’t forget to calibrate your MPU6050; each sensor has unique offsets that need to be compensated in the code.

Once dialed in, the result is a robot that looks like it defies gravity. Whether you’re hacking it for fun, turning it into a segway-like ride, or using it as a learning tool, a balancing bot is a great way to sharpen your control system skills. For more inspiration, check out this earlier attempt from 2022, or these self-balancing robots (one with a little work) from a year before that. You can read up on [mircemk]’s project details here.

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Il gruppo ransomware Funksec rivendica un attacco alla Sorbonne Université di Parigi, riportando di aver sottratto 20 GB di dati sensibili. Secondo le informazioni pubblicate sul loro Data Leak Site (DLS), i cybercriminali dichiarano di essere in possesso di documenti riservati, credenziali e piani strategici dell’ateneo.

Al momento, non è possibile confermare la veridicità di queste affermazioni, poiché l’organizzazione non ha ancora pubblicato alcun comunicato ufficiale in merito all’incidente. Tuttavia, Funksec avrebbe fissato un ultimatum di 12 giorni, minacciando di rendere pubblici i dati il 19 marzo 2025, qualora non venisse soddisfatta una richiesta – presumibilmente un riscatto in criptovaluta.

Analisi del post pubblicato nel Data Leak Site di Funksec

Il post pubblicato sul DLS di Funksec mostra chiaramente il logo della Sorbonne Université, accompagnato da un messaggio di rivendicazione.

Dall’analisi della schermata emergono alcuni dettagli rilevanti:

• Il conto alla rovescia: posizionato in alto a destra, indica il tempo rimanente prima della presunta pubblicazione dei dati. Questo è un classico strumento di pressione utilizzato dai gruppi ransomware per spingere la vittima a negoziare prima della scadenza.
• La descrizione dell’attacco: Funksec affermerebbe di possedere informazioni confidenziali, comprese credenziali e documenti strategici. Tuttavia, non vi sono prove concrete a supporto di questa dichiarazione.
• La tecnica di intimidazione: il testo presente nel DLS suggerirebbe alle vittime di cercare il proprio nome nei dati compromessi, una tattica psicologica utilizzata per amplificare l’ansia e aumentare la pressione su studenti, docenti e personale.
• L’identità del gruppo: il marchio “© 2025 Funksec ransomware” mostra l’intento del gruppo di consolidare la propria reputazione nel panorama del cybercrime. La loro strategia sembrerebbe mirata a costruire un’identità riconoscibile, simile a quella di gruppi più noti come LockBit o BlackCat.

Chi è Funksec? Un gruppo ransomware emergente

Funksec è un gruppo ransomware emerso pubblicamente alla fine del 2024, guadagnando rapidamente notorietà grazie ad attacchi mirati contro istituzioni governative e accademiche. I suoi membri si dichiarano autodidatti e sembrerebbero collaborare con altri gruppi di cybercriminali per affinare tecniche e strumenti offensivi. Molti attori dietro FunkSec sembrano inesperti, e parte delle informazioni pubblicate potrebbero essere riciclate da precedenti fughe di dati legate ad attività hacktiviste, sollevando dubbi sulla loro autenticità.

Un aspetto chiave dell’attività di FunkSec è la sua forte presenza su Breached Forum, una delle principali piattaforme di discussione del cybercrimine. Il gruppo ha sfruttato il forum per promuovere le proprie operazioni, condividere fughe di dati e guadagnare notorietà.

Uno dei membri più attivi su Breached Forum è Scorpion, noto anche come DesertStorm, che ha promosso FunkSec tramite un video su YouTube nell’ottobre 2024, sebbene il contenuto fosse più propagandistico che una reale dimostrazione delle capacità del gruppo. DesertStorm ha continuato a pubblicare presunte fughe di dati su Breached Forum fino a quando il suo account non è stato bannato nel novembre 2024. Dopo la sua esclusione, un altro attore, El Farado, ha assunto un ruolo chiave nella promozione del gruppo, condividendo fughe di dati e mantenendo alta la visibilità di FunkSec sul forum.

Le discussioni su Breached Forum indicano che FunkSec utilizza una combinazione di tattiche di hacktivismo e cybercrimine. Alcuni membri del gruppo sembrano avere trascorsi in ambienti hacktivisti, mentre altri sono più orientati al guadagno economico. Il loro ransomware, scritto in Rust e con sviluppo in continua evoluzione, è stato promosso direttamente su Breached Forum con aggiornamenti frequenti sulle nuove funzionalità. Inoltre, FunkSec ha pubblicato richieste di collaborazione e servizi aggiuntivi, tra cui un presunto sistema di “data sorting” gestito da un membro noto come XTN.

Alcune fughe di FunkSec sono state pubblicate su DarkForums da un utente con il nome Bjorka, un noto hacktivista indonesiano. Tuttavia, non ci sono prove definitive che il vero Bjorka sia coinvolto con FunkSec, e potrebbe trattarsi di un tentativo di sfruttare la sua notorietà.

L’analisi del loro ransomware suggerisce che il codice sia stato sviluppato con l’assistenza dell’intelligenza artificiale, consentendo al gruppo di iterare rapidamente le versioni nonostante la scarsa esperienza tecnica dei suoi membri. Questo solleva interrogativi sulla reale minaccia rappresentata da FunkSec e sulla difficoltà di distinguere tra hacktivismo e cybercrimine nell’ecosistema ransomware attuale.

Il gruppo opererebbe secondo il modello della doppia estorsione: non solo cifrerebbe i dati delle vittime, ma ne esfiltrerebbe una copia per minacciarne la pubblicazione in caso di mancato pagamento del riscatto. Questo approccio rende la strategia difensiva più complessa, poiché il semplice ripristino dei sistemi dai backup non sarebbe sufficiente per mitigare il danno reputazionale e legale derivante dalla diffusione delle informazioni rubate.

FunkSec sostiene di integrare l’intelligenza artificiale nel 30% dei propri processi operativi, sebbene non vi siano prove indipendenti a supporto di questa affermazione. Secondo quanto dichiarato, l’IA verrebbe utilizzata per:

• Automatizzare attacchi di phishing altamente mirati
• Creare strumenti personalizzati per lo sfruttamento delle vulnerabilità
• Analizzare e prioritizzare le potenziali vittime con maggiore efficienza

L’IA nel cybercrime: una nuova frontiera per il ransomware?

L’utilizzo dell’intelligenza artificiale nel cybercrime non è una novità assoluta, ma la crescente sofisticazione di questi strumenti sta alimentando una nuova ondata di minacce. Se le affermazioni di Funksec fossero confermate, saremmo di fronte a un gruppo che sfrutta strumenti avanzati per automatizzare operazioni complesse, riducendo la necessità di competenze manuali e aumentando l’efficacia degli attacchi.

Le applicazioni dell’IA nel cybercrime potrebbero includere:

• La generazione di campagne di phishing più realistiche
• L’identificazione di vulnerabilità con tecniche predittive
• Lo sviluppo di malware capaci di eludere i sistemi di sicurezza tradizionali

Nonostante ciò, la maggior parte dei ransomware oggi in circolazione continua a basarsi su tecniche consolidate, come lo sfruttamento di credenziali compromesse o l’abuso di vulnerabilità non patchate. L’intelligenza artificiale potrebbe accelerare questi processi, ma al momento non ha ancora rivoluzionato il panorama delle minacce.

Conclusioni

Al momento, la presunta violazione rivendicata dal gruppo Funksec Ransomware rimane non confermata da fonti istituzionali. Tuttavia, la potenziale gravità della questione — vista la natura strategica dei dati che sarebbero stati sottratti — richiede un’attenta valutazione dei rischi e delle contromisure da parte delle autorità competenti.

RHC continuerà a monitorare la situazione e pubblicherà eventuali ulteriori aggiornamenti qualora emergessero informazioni significative. Invitiamo chiunque sia a conoscenza di dettagli rilevanti a contattarci attraverso la mail crittografata del whistleblower, garantendo la possibilità di rimanere anonimi.

L'articolo Sorbonne Université nel mirino di Funksec: il gruppo ransomware rivendica un attacco proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

SD cards & the much smaller microSD cards are found on many devices, with the card often accessible from outside the enclosure. Unfortunately there’s a solid chance that especially small microSD cards will find their way past the microSD card reader slot and into the enclosure. This is what happened to [Rob] of the SevenFortyOne Radios and Repairs channel on YouTube with a NanoVNA unit. While shaking the unit, you can clearly hear the microSD card rattling inside, courtesy of the rather large gap above the card slot.

After a quick teardown and extracting the lost microSD card, the solution to prevent this is a simple bit of foam stuck on top of the microSD card slot, so that the too large opening in the enclosure is now fully blocked. It’s clearly a bit of a design fail in this particular NanoVNA unit, worsened by the tiny size of the card and having to use a fingernail to push the card into the slot as it’s so far inside the enclosure.

While [Rob] seems to blame himself for this event, we’d chalk it mostly up to poor design. It’s an issue that’s seen with certain SBC enclosures and various gadgets too, where losing a microSD card is pretty much a matter of time, and hugely fiddly at the best of times. That said, what is your preferred way of handling microSD card insertion & removal in devices like these?

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Imagine cooling your building with the same principle that kept Victorian-era icehouses stocked with lake-frozen blocks, but in modern form. That’s the idea behind ice batteries, a clever energy storage hack that’s been quietly slashing cooling costs across commercial buildings. The invention works by freezing water when energy is cheap, and using that stored cold later, they turn major power hogs (air conditioning, we’re looking at you) into more efficient, cost-effective systems.

Pioneers like Nostromo Energy and Ice Energy are refining the tech. Nostromo’s IceBrick modules pack 25 kWh of cooling capacity each, install on rooftops, and cost around $250 per kWh—about half the price of lithium-ion storage. Ice Energy’s Ice Bear 40 integrates with HVAC systems, shifting up to 95% of peak cooling demand to off-peak hours. And for homes, the Ice Bear 20 replaces traditional AC units while doubling as a thermal battery.

Unlike lithium-ion, ice batteries don’t degrade chemically – their water is endlessly reusable. Combining the technology with this hack, it’s even possible in environments where water is scarce. But the trade-off? They only store cooling energy. No frozen kilowatts for your lightbulbs, just an efficient way to handle the biggest energy drain in most buildings.

Could ice batteries help decentralize energy storage? They’re already proving their worth in high-demand areas like California and Texas. Read the full report here and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Original photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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L’operazione internazionale Operazione Cumberland, condotta dalle forze dell’ordine di 19 paesi, ha portato all’arresto di 25 sospettati che, come parte di un gruppo, distribuivano materiale pedopornografico creato utilizzando l’intelligenza artificiale. Nel corso delle indagini sono stati sequestrati 173 dispositivi elettronici e identificati 273 presunti membri della rete. La maggior parte degli arresti è avvenuta dopo 33 perquisizioni in tutto il mondo.

Il principale sospettato, un cittadino danese, è stato arrestato nel novembre 2024. L’uomo ha utilizzato una piattaforma online per creare e distribuire contenuti di intelligenza artificiale. L’accesso ai materiali è stato concesso agli utenti in cambio di una cifra simbolica.

L’Europol ha osservato che tali immagini sono così facili da creare che anche persone prive di formazione tecnica possono produrle a fini criminali. Ciò contribuisce alla crescita del CSAM, complicando il lavoro degli investigatori e rendendo difficile l’identificazione dei criminali e delle vittime.

Europol ha affermato che nei prossimi giorni lancerà una campagna online per contrastare l’uso dell’intelligenza artificiale per scopi illegali. L’operazione avrà come target gli utenti attivi online, compresi gli acquirenti di contenuti illegali, e comprenderà messaggi di avviso sui social media, conversazioni preventive e notifiche ufficiali.

Di recente Europol ha rilasciato uno nuovo Un bollettino di intelligence che rivela come sette online “estremamente violente” stiano proliferando rapidamente su Internet. Questi gruppi manipolano abilmente bambini e adolescenti, costringendoli a farsi del male e a commettere azioni illegali. E a gennaio, un’indagine ha rivelato che uomini adulti, spesso con precedenti penali, offrivano servizi fotografici per creare “carriere da star” per le ragazze. Al contrario, contribuivano alla creazione di materiali CSAM.

L'articolo Orrore Digitale: Operazione Cumberland Svela Rete di CSAM Creata con AI! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Gli utenti di alcuni browser meno diffusi lamentano problemi di accesso a vari siti dovuti al funzionamento dei sistemi Cloudflare. I giornalisti del The Register riferiscono che la loro attenzione su questo problema è stata attirata dagli utenti, dagli specialisti della sicurezza informatica e dagli sviluppatori del browser open source Pale Moon.

Sembra che gli utenti si lamentino regolarmente della mancata disponibilità del sito web relativo al forum di Cloudflare, ma l’azienda non sembra prestarvi attenzione. Ad esempio, i ricercatori hanno trovato segnalazioni di problemi relativi a Cloudflare e al blocco di siti web risalenti al 2015 , al 2022 , a marzo e luglio 2024 e a gennaio 2025.

I problemi sorgono perché Cloudflare mira a combattere le botnet e gli attacchi DDoS rilevando e bloccando qualsiasi attività sospetta. Ad esempio, dispositivi infetti che fanno parte di botnet ed eseguono determinati script. Un modo per rilevarli è controllare l’agente del browser e, se non proviene da un browser noto, bloccarlo.

Purtroppo l’elenco dei browser accettabili è limitato e include solo le ultime versioni di browser noti come Chrome (e i suoi numerosi derivati) e Firefox. Di norma, gli utenti delle ultime versioni dei browser Pale Moon, Falkon e SeaMonkey riscontrano problemi di blocco.

Le ultime note di rilascio di Pale Moon indicano che gli sviluppatori stanno cercando di risolvere questo problema, che spesso provoca il blocco del browser, la mancata risposta alle richieste o l’arresto anomalo del sistema. Anche alcuni utenti di Firefox 115 ESR (l’ultima versione per macOS 10.13 e Windows 7) riscontrano problemi di blocco. Tra i siti frequentemente interessati dal problema ci sono science.org, steamdb.info, convertapi.com e persino community.cloudflare.com.

Allo stesso tempo, secondo alcuni partecipanti alla discussione del problema su Hacker News, Cloudflare potrebbe considerare un’attività sospetta non solo l’utilizzo di browser o sistemi operativi di nicchia, ma anche una richiesta di un URL senza specificare un ID di riferimento. Mentre un utente prudente può bloccare il tracciamento, per il provider CDN tale attività è un segnale che le azioni non sono eseguite da un essere umano.

I giornalisti sottolineano che il supporto tecnico di Cloudflare è principalmente incentrato sui clienti aziendali e che gli utenti comuni possono solo lamentarsi di ciò che accade sui forum della community. Tuttavia, a giudicare dal numero di messaggi riguardanti il ​​blocco, l’azienda non monitora i forum per segnalazioni di problemi.

L'articolo Game Over: Cloudflare e il caos sui browser meno diffusi! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

The late 1950s were such an optimistic time in America. World War II had been over for less than a decade, the economy boomed thanks to pent-up demand after years of privation, and everyone was having babies — so many babies. The sky was the limit, especially with new technologies that promised a future filled with miracles, including abundant nuclear power that would be “too cheap to meter.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way, of course, but the whole “Atoms for Peace” thing did provide the foundation for a lot of innovations that we still benefit from to this day. This 1958 film on “The Armour Research Reactor” details the construction and operation of the world’s first privately owned research reactor. Built at the Illinois Institute of Technology by Atomics International, the reactor was a 50,000-watt aqueous-homogenous design using a solution of uranyl sulfate in distilled water as its fuel. The core is tiny, about a foot in diameter, and assembled by hand right in front of the camera. The stainless steel sphere is filled with 90 feet (27 meters) of stainless tubing to circulate cooling water through the core. Machined graphite reflector blocks surrounded the core and its fuel overflow tank (!) before the reactor was installed in “biological shielding” made from super-dense iron ore concrete with walls 5 feet (1.5 m) thick — just a few of the many advanced safety precautions taken “to ensure completely safe operation in densely populated areas.”

While the reactor design is interesting enough, the control panels and instrumentation are what really caught our eye. The Fallout vibe is strong, including the fact that the controls are all right in the room with the reactor. This allows technicians equipped with their Cutie Pie meters to insert samples into irradiation tubes, some of which penetrate directly into the heart of the core, where neutron flux is highest. Experiments included the creation of radioactive organic compounds for polymer research, radiation hardening of those new-fangled transistors, and manufacturing radionuclides for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

This mid-century technological gem might look a little sketchy to modern eyes, but the Armour Research Reactor had a long career. It was in operation until 1967 and decommissioned in 1972, and similar reactors were installed in universities and private facilities all over the world. Most of them are gone now, though, with only five aqueous-homogenous reactors left operating today.

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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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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.

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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…