On 22 January, Ronald Starink (head of Nikhef’s Computer Technology department) was pictured on the front page of the NRC. The article to which the picture refers is about Nikhef’s decision to keep the institute’s e-mail traffic in its own hands, rather than in those of tech giants such as Google or Apple. Starink: ‘We don’t want to be tied to one party. Because commercial parties never stay innovative for long. At some point they start trying to make money more than anything else. If you have outsourced your data management to them, you can’t leave. Then you have swum into a trap.’
Nikhef system administrator Daniël Kollmer also talks about managing Nikhef’s own mail server. With his decades of experience, Kollmer found it not so complicated to arrange Nikhef’s server in such a way that it provides recipients with proof that the server can be trusted. He explains: ‘Essentially, you have to prove that an e-mail really comes from where it says it comes from – so in our case, really from Nikhef’s server. And that I am a user legitimately using it. The recipient can request that proof.’
Read the full article online on the NRC website (in Dutch only): https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/01/22/een-eigen-e-mailserver-om-niet-afhankelijk-te-zijn-van-big-tech-a4880536
Source: NRC
