Explane.org

The online complaints center of Schiphol Airport has been hacked yesterday. Personal data of thousands of complainants have been stolen.

The hack has been confirmed by the airport and will be reported to the Dutch privacy protection agency. Data leaks can be fined with a maximum penalty of 10 million euros by Dutch authorities.

The online complaints center was widely criticized by residents because it did not use secure connections to their website. This left personal data that has to be entered to complain vulnerable.

Furiously
Among the compromised data are street addresses and e-mail addresses from residents in the area of Schiphol Airport. On Twitter a lot of them react furiously. Read more >

Today, at the 100th birthday of KLM, one of Europe’s most polluting airliners per capita, we have passed the 100,000th registration with our app Explane.

Reaching this milestone the app is a huge success for enabling residents to register and document aviation noise. With the data, people can research the noise nuisance in their neighborhoods.

Use in democratic process
We have already seen the first documents from the Explane-website sent into the democratic process. Some residents have researched their situation and published their results in local and regional media and pointed politicians at the situation. Read more >

This article is intended for our Dutch users, so the text is in Dutch. You can read the English translation at the bottom of this post.

So in Dutch:
Met de makers van de site ‘Over mijn dak’ onderzoeken we de mogelijkheid om deze app uit te breiden zodat iedere meting ook direct als klacht kan worden doorgestuurd aan het Bewoners Aanspreekpunt Schiphol (BAS).

Hiervoor zou dan een tweede versie van Explane worden gebouwd, die via ‘Over mijn dak’ uw BAS-account kan koppelen aan de app. De koppeling gaat wél geld kosten omdat het systeem moet worden gebouwd en onderhouden. We denken aan een jaarlijks abonnementsprijs van 40 euro. Read more >

Sometimes our app doesn’t catch the airplane you are trying to measure. This can have various reasons.

The identification of the specific aircraft is retrieved in real time from the database of the Open Sky Network at the start of every measurement. This means that your phone needs to have a good and stable internet connection to be able to receive this information.

If your internet connection is not stable enough, it will not be able to determine the ID. Also sometimes there can be a lag in the availability of the data. Or the database can be unavailable for technical reasons.

Dependent
We are dependent on that data to determine the ID. Since we do not registrate measurement without flight data for obvious reasons, you will not be able to send in that measurement. Read more >

Just before the summer holidays we organized a calibration day with a large number of volunteers to find out to what extent the measurements with the free Explane app correspond to the real noise level. On average, Explane appears to deviate only 2 dB from a calibrated dB meter.

Explane.org and SchipholWatch are very happy with these results, especially since the measurements with Explane now appear to be more reliable than the calculations by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure & Water Management and those of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

‘6 dB is within expected margins’
As a reminder: the measurements of a test flight mid-last year (‘experience flight’) were sometimes as much as 6 dB higher than the previously calculated values. The minister, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, called this deviation “well within the expected margins”. Read more >

Since a few weeks our app shows an error warning from Google Maps. We will soon repair this. The warning does NOT affect the functionality of the app, so you can keep sending us your noise registrations.

The warning is actually very positive news. It tells us that our period of free use of Google Maps is over. We now have to pay for the use. This is a direct result of the wide and intensive use of the app. When we started it, we did not expect so many users and so many registrations in such a short period.

We now already have 70,000 registrations of aviation noise in our database. A technical university in The Netherlands will research the data, and we are invited to insert the Explane-data in a ‘civic science’ project of the Dutch health research institute. Read more >

Yesterday evening we have started a petition to stop growth at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Do you also want a cap on further growth? Please sign our petition!

You can find the petition (in Dutch) at https://petities.nl/petitions/nee-tegen-groei-van-schiphol.

Within 24 hours it has been signed by (almost) a thousand people, most of them residents of communities that are terrorised by aviation noise and pollution.

Please sign the petition and share this message by visiting https://cms.explane.org.

As a user of this app Explane, you might ask yourself: what do they do with all those registrations? We publish them! At https://reports.explane.org.

Please take a look at that brand new site. Together we already made over 40.000 of aviation noise measurements (as of June 28th, 2019).

At the site you can zoom in to the data that is important for your community. You can easily make screen shots and you are free to publish them on your own site, your social media account or via e-mail to send to your local politicians or press.

Please make use of this wealthy source of information. For now, it’s our only alternative to the crooky calculations from the aviation industry. Read more >

At this moment our app Explane reports more often than normal that there is no plane to be found in the noise that you tried to capture.

The reason for this is that work is being done on the database that supplies the aircraft data to Explane. The Open Sky Network – supplier of this information – is working on improvements to its systems.

The network reported this a few days ago via Twitter:

Just a note that the tracks part of our API is under maintenance for a while to make some necessary improvements. You can always use flights for most intents and purposes: https://t.co/bR34IB9T0p

— OpenSky Network (@OpenSkyNetwork) June 14, 2019

Unfortunately we do not know how long this maintenance will take. We do hope to be able to inform you as soon as possible if the systems are running as usual (or better)!

We hope for some consideration from your site. Unfortunately the cause is beyond our control. Read more >

UN Environment published an unusually stark critique of carbon offsetting on Monday. On Tuesday, the article was taken down, following queries by Climate Home News.

In the original article, archived by the Wayback Machine, a climate specialist at the UN organisation warned against considering carbon offsets as “our get-out-jail-free card”.

“The era of carbon offsets is drawing to a close,” Niklas Hagelberg wrote. “Buying carbon credits in exchange for a clean conscience while you carry on flying, buying diesel cars and powering your home with fossil fuels is no longer acceptable or widely accepted.” Read more >