Category Archives: Outlets

Civio

Translated story: Transparency delayed is not transparency at all: Italy, Germany and Spain allow slowest replies to public information requests

Public entities in Italy, Germany and Spain have one calendar month to respond to requests for access to public information. They do not even always meet this deadline, which is the longest of the countries examined in a Civio-led investigation by members of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJnet).

At the other extreme is Slovakia, which grants its authorities only eight working days, excluding weekends and public holidays. Poland, Portugal, Croatia and the Czech Republic, allow almost half a month to respond to requests made through their transparency laws. Slovenia and Greece allow 20 working days, which places them almost at the bottom of the countries analysed.

What the ten European countries surveyed do share is a general lack of compliance with transparency rules. “The law is good. The problem is its implementation,” says Croatian journalist Dijana Pribačić Jurić of H-Alter. “We have had cases where, after a lengthy administrative procedure, we received information on our journalistic requests only after two to three years, when they are no longer relevant in a journalistic sense,” adds Toni Gabrić, editor in chief of the same media outlet. The same happens in Spain, Portugal and Greece, according to sources interviewed by Civio.

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Madrid, News, The New European

Racism: The shame of Spain

In Madrid, a few years ago, two teams of kids were playing football. A young boy scored a goal and set off in celebration, but then something odd happened – the opposing team’s managers asked the referee to stop the game. The boy, they argued, was too old to be on the pitch.

Dolores Galindo, the president of the Dragones de Lavapiés football club, was there. Lavapiés is one of Madrid’s melting-pot neighbourhoods, and it was one of her players who scored the goal. The boy wasn’t too old, she says. He was entitled to play. But on the other hand, she says, he did have darker skin.

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IEEE Spectrum

CubeSat Operators Launch an IoT Space Race

A rocket carrying CubeSats launched into Earth orbit two years ago, on 22 March 2021. Two of those CubeSats represented competing approaches to bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to space. One, operated by Lacuna Space, uses a protocol called LoRaWAN, a long-range, low-power protocol owned by Semtech. The other, owned by Sateliot, uses the narrowband IoT protocol, following in the footsteps of OQ Technology, which launched a similar IoT satellite demonstration in 2019. And separately, in late 2022, the cellular industry standard-setter 3GPP incorporated satellite-based 5G into standard cellular service with its release 17.

In other words, there is now an IoT space race.

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IEEE Spectrum

No More ‘No Service.’

IN 2023, YOU OR someone you know will be able to send a text message through space. Late in 2022, hardware behemoths Huawei and Applereleased cellular telephones capable of texting on traditional satellite-communications networks. A pair of ambitious startups, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, also started building new low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networksdesigned to reach conventional 5G cellphones outside terrestrial coverage.

“Offering direct satellite access to smartphones without modifications would allow access to billions of devices worldwide,” says Symeon Chatzinotas, the head of the University of Luxembourg’s SigCom research group.

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