Most Balkan countries have signed up to the US ‘Clean Network’ 5G security initiative. With Bulgaria signing on October 23, 2020, 27 out of 30 NATO members have joined the pact, and only Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro in the Balkans have not.

According to the US State Department, the programme aims to safe guard data privacy, security and human rights from such “authoritarian malign actors” as the Chinese Communist Party.

The United States will look to expand its influence in the region in the struggle against “untrusted 5G vendors”. This will not go without a response from China; Beijing will look…

Two years after a mass surveillance system with thousands of facial recognition security cameras was introduced to the streets of Serbian capital Belgrade, concern continues to grow about the impact of the technology.

The Huawei-based surveillance system sparked controversy when it was initially introduced in 2019. And now human and digital rights organizations in the country are pushing back and warning about the risks that facial recognition software can bring.

During the summer of 2020, the SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based digital rights organization that advocates for data privacy and digital security, launched a website called “Thousands of cameras”, as a…

As the early deployment of 5G infrastructure across Western Europe takes shape, inside Eastern Europe, most countries are at very different stages when it comes to their individual 5G rollouts. Due to the different technical, legal or even political contexts, these countries are making difficult choices about what to do next.

The Balkan region, where most countries aren’t EU members, is often seen as an arena where the international powers try to create their own spheres of influence. …

After the re-emergence of a Telegram group sharing explicit pictures and videos of women and girls, experts say authorities must act on several levels to confront the devastating scourge of online harassment.

Authorities in North Macedonia face an uphill battle to confront the dangers of online harassment, experts warn, following a public outcry over the reappearance of a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram in which thousands of users were sharing explicit pictures and videos of women and girls, some of them minors.

The group, known as ‘Public Room’, was first shut down in January 2020, only to re-emerge…

The cyberattacks that targeted multiple US government agencies and companies in recent months have raised the alarm in developing Eastern European countries regarding their own cybersecurity capabilities.

During the past year, some of them, like North Macedonia, have already experienced breaches of their state IT systems: last summer, the country had its electoral process disrupted by massive DDoS attacks that happened on election night. Hackers targeted the website of the state electoral commission, which went down for a few days before the election results could finally be made available to the Macedonian public.

In 2019 in neighboring Bulgaria, more than…

The Western Balkans, a region surrounded by EU member states, could pose a threat for the spread of the virus to neighboring countries if its citizens remain unvaccinated

While the Covid-19 vaccination process has been well underway in the UK and EU member countries during the last few weeks, countries in the Western Balkans region are still scrambling to secure the necessary vaccines doses for their populations.

The Western Balkans, a region practically surrounded by EU member states, has been mostly relying on the COVAX mechanism, a WHO-led global effort to provide vaccines for the poorer countries, to provide the…

To Matjaz Bericic, chief technology officer at Telekom Slovenije, 5G is “not the destination, it is the journey”.

If that’s the case, the countries of the Balkans are at very different stages of that journey, but

for all of them the potential benefits of the next cellular standard are vast, experts say.

“An early strategy on 5G deployment and frequency licencing could be a great opportunity for the region, as it can be seen as part of the advanced infrastructure that can attract investments from, for example, industrial production companies or multimedia production companies,” Petar Popovski, professor of wireless connectivity…

With the current health crisis hitting most aspects of people’s lives, many have turned to new hobbies that suit social distancing and staying at home.

Stargazing and amateur astronomy are two activities to benefit from people’s enforced isolation, with lockdowns across the globe leading to an increase in people observing the night skies and a rise in sales of astronomical instruments.

But despite the attraction of these activities, some people have found the use of traditional telescopes hard work, especially those who are new to amateur astronomy. It’s a problem that a young French company is trying to tackle.

Vaonis…