VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS often points to the benefits of its “Nitro” system which relies on SmartNICs. VMware’s push into private cloud assumed that its customers wanted an on-prem version of a public cloud – at least in terms of their operating model. Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network functions. It also created a version of its NSX distributed firewall to run on the devices. At its VMware Explore conference earlier this month, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's application networking and security division, said the virtualization giant has “walked back from that space.” Mahajan said VMware was able to get its wares running on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia but struggled with Intel hardware. The effort was non-trivial, Mahajan said, because it involved microcode. Once VMware got its product working, buyers weren’t excited. “Customers kept talking, but not buying,” Mahajan said, making it hard to justify ongoing development work. Meanwhile, conventional NICs evolved – and increased throughput – to the point at which SmartNICs afforded fewer benefits. VMware has therefore quietly stopped selling the distributed firewall. “VMware was ahead of the industry in using DPUs, or SmartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around SmartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson told The Register. The Distributed Services Engine that allows VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation suite to use SmartNICs remains a part of the product and continues to receive support. “We've also continued looking at ways to simplify the customer experience and adapt our product approach as needed,” the spokesperson wrote. For example, we've developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7, which is a different mechanism than the Distributed Services Engine. It's part of our continued focus on giving customers practical paths to infrastructure efficiency.” The spokesperson also pointed to VMware innovating with memory tiering, global deduplication and its AI Factory. Nvidia also uses the term “AI factory” to describe a collection of hardware – including SmartNICs – necessary to run inferencing at scale. VMware and Nvidia are firm partners. The virtualization pioneer has also teamed up with AMD, whose own “Helios” rack-scale AI rigs also use SmartNICs. VMware’s therefore almost certainly not done with the devices forever. And because many of the processors on SmartNICs use the Arm architecture, the work it did to create the Distributed Services Engine may live on in its version of ESX for Arm. ®

VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS often points to the benefits of its “Nitro” system which relies on SmartNICs. VMware’s push into private cloud assumed that its customers wanted an on-prem version of a public cloud – at least in terms of their operating model. Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network functions. It also created a version of its NSX distributed firewall to run on the devices. At its VMware Explore conference earlier this month, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's application networking and security division, said the virtualization giant has “walked back from that space.” Mahajan said VMware was able to get its wares running on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia but struggled with Intel hardware. The effort was non-trivial, Mahajan said, because it involved microcode. Once VMware got its product working, buyers weren’t excited. “Customers kept talking, but not buying,” Mahajan said, making it hard to justify ongoing development work. Meanwhile, conventional NICs evolved – and increased throughput – to the point at which SmartNICs afforded fewer benefits. VMware has therefore quietly stopped selling the distributed firewall. “VMware was ahead of the industry in using DPUs, or SmartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around SmartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson told The Register. The Distributed Services Engine that allows VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation suite to use SmartNICs remains a part of the product and continues to receive support. “We've also continued looking at ways to simplify the customer experience and adapt our product approach as needed,” the spokesperson wrote. For example, we've developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7, which is a different mechanism than the Distributed Services Engine. It's part of our continued focus on giving customers practical paths to infrastructure efficiency.” The spokesperson also pointed to VMware innovating with memory tiering, global deduplication and its AI Factory. Nvidia also uses the term “AI factory” to describe a collection of hardware – including SmartNICs – necessary to run inferencing at scale. VMware and Nvidia are firm partners. The virtualization pioneer has also teamed up with AMD, whose own “Helios” rack-scale AI rigs also use SmartNICs. VMware’s therefore almost certainly not done with the devices forever. And because many of the processors on SmartNICs use the Arm architecture, the work it did to create the Distributed Services Engine may live on in its version of ESX for Arm. ®

Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers." They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this was before broadband and Marco's company had only a 19k baud dial-up connection. Marco's boss, whom he described as a "sciagurato" – Italian for a wretch – kept one of those catalogs on his desk. "He perused it every day, like a kid waiting for Christmas," Marco told The Register. "One day he found an exceptional laser printer at almost one-seventh the cost. It was such a good a deal he ordered two of them." Marco said the boss told anyone who would listen that this feat of cost-cutting would surely propel him out of the tech team and into management. "The wiser among us were already counting the days until the disaster," Marco wrote. Disaster duly arrived with the delivery. "When the courier delivered the printer, it came in two huge packages, but not big enough for a laser printer," Marco observed. After wrestling with the packaging, the horrible truth emerged. "Our boss had bought two laser printer stands," Marco wrote, "because the catalog showed the stands with the printer on top." The company therefore had two stands and no printers. The boss's claim to promotion-worthy procurement prowess had collapsed. "We promptly hid the two pieces of junk in the darkness of our 'obsolete hardware store' and they are probably still there," Marco wrote. He suspects they are not alone, but surrounded by "other good deals, all waiting for the mercy of incineration." Have you or a colleague ordered the wrong thing? If so, click here to send your story to Who, Me? We'll put it on display rather than hide it in the back room. ®

Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers." They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this was before broadband and Marco's company had only a 19k baud dial-up connection. Marco's boss, whom he described as a "sciagurato" – Italian for a wretch – kept one of those catalogs on his desk. "He perused it every day, like a kid waiting for Christmas," Marco told The Register. "One day he found an exceptional laser printer at almost one-seventh the cost. It was such a good a deal he ordered two of them." Marco said the boss told anyone who would listen that this feat of cost-cutting would surely propel him out of the tech team and into management. "The wiser among us were already counting the days until the disaster," Marco wrote. Disaster duly arrived with the delivery. "When the courier delivered the printer, it came in two huge packages, but not big enough for a laser printer," Marco observed. After wrestling with the packaging, the horrible truth emerged. "Our boss had bought two laser printer stands," Marco wrote, "because the catalog showed the stands with the printer on top." The company therefore had two stands and no printers. The boss's claim to promotion-worthy procurement prowess had collapsed. "We promptly hid the two pieces of junk in the darkness of our 'obsolete hardware store' and they are probably still there," Marco wrote. He suspects they are not alone, but surrounded by "other good deals, all waiting for the mercy of incineration." Have you or a colleague ordered the wrong thing? If so, click here to send your story to Who, Me? We'll put it on display rather than hide it in the back room. ®

irwinm16 has added a photo to the pool:

niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

As mentioned in my previous two postings from this series, I had to blow the dust out of my old PC the other day and found a folder of jpgs from the prosumer-grade Nikon Coolpix E5000 I owned for a while.

The Coolpix was my second digital camera and boasted a 5 megapixel CCD sensor, and featured a cutting edge, flip-out tilt-and-swivel screen. It could even save images as TIF files!

I must have been travelling back home in the work car just before sunset and stopped just north of Jericho in the Tasmanian midlands and took 3 frames of the clouds, grass and trees on the horizon. I've since found out the area is the Woodford Plain.

This is the widest shot of the three.

Nikon Coolpix E5000, 7.1-21.4mm (28-85) f/2.8-4.8, 1/250th sec at f/4.8, ISO 100.

I have no specific recollection of what happened to the little camera - but I may have just picked up a minty copy of the 10MP CCD P7100 ;-)

The Chargers star is huge, can run and has a golden right arm. But he has never quite reached the heights many expected for him

Justin Herbert is one of the most promising quarterbacks in the NFL. In fact, Justin Herbert has forever been one of the most promising quarterbacks in the NFL. That adjective, “promising,” continued to be load-bearing on Sunday, as Herbert and his Chargers turned in an underwhelming performance in a 26-14 loss to the Raiders. Los Angeles are now 0-2 on the year, with those losses coming to the team that just picked No 1 in the draft and a moribund Arizona who picked No 3. Stockholders in Herbert’s growth were taking a beating in after-hours trading. But, as ever, there’s plenty of reason to debate whether Herbert underachieved or whether his team let him down.

Herbert is 6ft 6in, can run, has a golden right arm and is capable of making astonishing throws. NFL decision-makers view him as roughly the sixth-best QB in the league but also say things like, “He should have more accolades at this point.” Certainly, he should have more wins this season, but on Sunday the 28-year-old found himself outdueled by one of the league’s senior citizens in Vegas quarterback Kirk Cousins, who is 10 years his senior. Herbert completed 15 of 27 passes for a touchdown and two interceptions, and he also took three sacks. Cousins threw a pick and took two sacks but was much more efficient from down to down (8.7 yards per attempt to Herbert’s 7.1), and the Chargers offense mostly sputtered. In 13 possessions, Los Angeles put together two long touchdown drives and otherwise didn’t march more than 30 yards in a series.

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War, AI disruption and markets in turmoil: the warnings are all there. But lessons from the 2008 crash could help us

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Liverpool look stronger at the back, youngsters shine for Brighton and Brentford, and James Trafford makes his England case with Leeds

• Premier League table | Top scorers

In the week that 16-year-old Max Dowman has been thrust into the spotlight, it was another teenager who gave us a glimpse of the future in Brighton’s impressive win over Arsenal. Charalampos Kostoulas – nicknamed ‘Babis’ in his homeland, in homage to former Argentina striker Gabriel Batistuta – has already started twice as many Premier League games as he did in his first season in English football, when he was a backup for Danny Welbeck. The 19-year-old repaid Fabian Hürzeler’s faith in him against the reigning champions. Despite his tender years, Kostoulas already possesses the physical attributes to mix it with the best. He caused Gabriel Magalhães and company problems all afternoon, capping it off with a brilliant goal from 25 yards, his third in eight days. “We always knew that he’s capable of scoring goals out of nowhere,” said Hürzeler. “He just has this intrinsic motivation of really improving every day. He gets more and more professional, he understands the demands from the Premier League more, he understands our demands.” Ed Aarons

Match report: Brighton 3-0 Arsenal

Match report: Bournemouth 0-1 Liverpool

Match report: Fulham 1-1 Manchester United

Match report: Leeds 0-0 Crystal Palace

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Talks between officials in New York come ahead of summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping later in the week

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

Stock markets in Asia have risen led by technology shares, lifted by optimism around talks between the US and China on trade and artificial intelligence, while oil prices declined.

2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world.

Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.

Scott Bessent and Chinese vice premier He Lifeng have already laid the groundwork [for the Trump-Xi meeting] in New York, with trade, investment and artificial intelligence on the table, but this is not a market waiting for a grand bargain.

It is waiting to see whether both sides can keep the next trade grenade in the drawer.

9.30am BST: UK S&P Global Consumer sentiment index

1.30pm BST: US Chicago Fed National Activity Index for August

2.10pm BST: IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva speaks at the IMF Legal Department 80th anniversary conference in Washington

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Gladwell’s highly readable investigation into US gun culture fails to engage with the bigger questions

Once, while having a steak dinner with Republicans in a small town in Indiana, the man sitting opposite me asked: “How do you cope in London, when Muslims elected that mayor and you have all that gun control?” I’d been in enough such situations to know that there was no “winning” a conversation that starts like this and so did my best to playfully bat the question away.

“Well, the Muslims didn’t elect a mayor – Londoners elected a Muslim mayor,” I said. “And we don’t talk much about gun control for the same reason we don’t talk about polar bear control: we don’t have many polar bears and we don’t have many guns.”

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Bestselling book The Good Immigrant launches a series of thoughtful explorations of race – starting with the hosts of Pod Save the Uk. Plus, a look at an outrageous heist

Launching alongside a 10th-anniversary edition of the essay collection by writers of colour, this podcast sees its editor, Nikesh Shukla, reconvene with the book’s contributors. A series of thoughtful conversations about what has changed and what’s stayed the same when it comes to race in the UK starts with Nish Kumar and Coco Khan on England flags, and why humour is essential to their political podcasting. Hannah J Davies
Widely available, episodes weekly

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Simple but emphatic martial arts and a couple of classy cameos are all that give this blandly modern action film a fighting chance

Despite featuring a clutch of Power Rangers graduates, including Jason David Frank, who died in 2022, this crowdfunded effort is beholden to a more recent action tradition. It feels like it’s been cobbled together by ticking tropes off the modern superhero bingo card: Dark Knight-esque pariah hero, Gotham-style civic pantomime with the mayor, police and media, Iron Man helmet-cams, a sprig of eastern mysticism in the initiation sequence, western fighters appropriating said eastern mysticism … the list goes on.

After a dustoff with his nemesis Ashtagor that levelled downtown Virtuo City, the superhero White Dragon (Frank) has been held responsible for the catastrophe and forced into exile. With the death count – 1,263 – tattooed in red above his right ear, and the crystal that was the source of his power shattered in two, he is now plain old Erik Reed. It’s not only the authorities who are bent on finding him: the pharma mogul Jai Katua (Aaron Schoenke), who lost his pregnant wife, wants payback. If Katua spending his time on solo katana sessions in his billionaire superlab wasn’t already a mental health red flag, accepting one of the crystal halves and a revenge mandate from Ashtagor should definitely merit an intervention.

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Een speciale commissie in de Sociaal-Economische Raad is het eens geworden over de uitgangspunten voor de grootste belastingherziening in decennia, meldt NRC. Het definitieve advies moet dit najaar verschijnen. De Tweede Kamer wil al sinds 2019 van het toeslagenstelsel af.

De Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER), één van de belangrijkste adviesorganen van de regering, heeft een advies opgesteld over de manier waarop het kabinet het huidige toeslagenstelsel grotendeels kan afschaffen. Volgens het plan kunnen de toeslagen vervangen worden door onder meer een lagere zorgpremie en een hoger inkomstenbelastingtarief voor mensen met een midden- en hoger inkomen, oplopend tot 56 procent. Dat bevestigen vijf betrokken bronnen aan NRC.

Het advies is opgesteld door een speciale commissie binnen de SER, met daarin onder meer de belangrijkste werkgevers- en werknemersorganisaties, beleidsambtenaren van Financiën en Sociale Zaken en Pieter Hasekamp, directeur van het Centraal Planbureau (CPB). Een conceptversie van het plan is inmiddels door het CPB doorgerekend.

WASHINGTON (ANP/AFP) - De Verenigde Staten hebben in het geheim afspraken gemaakt met tientallen landen om migranten op te nemen die geen banden hebben met die landen, staat in een maandag gepubliceerd rapport van het Franse collectief Forbidden Stories.

Sinds het begin van Donald Trumps tweede ambtstermijn in januari 2025 heeft Washington deals gesloten met 35 ontwikkelingslanden om migranten op te nemen die niet wettelijk naar hun eigen thuisland kunnen worden gestuurd. Volgens het onderzoek heeft Trumps kabinet 410 miljoen dollar (357 miljoen euro) vrijgemaakt voor directe betalingen aan de ontvangende landen of aan VN-organisaties die de uitzetting faciliteren.

Tot september zijn zeker 25.447 mensen naar derde landen uitgezet, blijkt uit data verzameld door Forbidden Stories, in samenwerking met een verband van internationale journalisten. Het merendeel, ongeveer 20.000 mensen, werd naar Mexico gestuurd. De rest is opgenomen door landen in Latijns-Amerika, Afrika en de Pacifische regio.

BERLIJN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Tienduizenden werknemers in heel Duitsland gaan maandag actievoeren voor behoud van industriebanen en fabrieken. Onder meer medewerkers van Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Porsche en grote toeleveranciers nemen deel aan demonstraties, op meer dan 280 locaties door het hele land.

Het gaat al lange tijd niet goed met de Duitse auto-industrie. De invloedrijke vakbond IG Metall dringt er bij bedrijven op aan om fabrieken en banen te beschermen en roept tegelijkertijd de regering van bondskanselier Friedrich Merz op om de energiekosten te verlagen en de binnenlandse productie af te schermen tegen goedkope import.

"We gaan niet lijdzaam toezien hoe een cruciale industrie stap voor stap wordt uitgehold", stelt Thorsten Gröger, de regionale leider van IG Metall in Nedersaksen en Saksen-Anhalt. "De werknemers hebben de misstappen van de afgelopen jaren niet veroorzaakt. Zij mogen daar nu niet de rekening voor betalen."

Bierbrouwer Heineken staat op het punt 300 pubs over te nemen van Stonegate, de grootste Britse pubketen. Dat meldt de Britse krant The Times. Stonegate kampt met een schuldenlast van 3 miljard pond (ongeveer 3,5 miljard euro) en wil 1000 van zijn beste pubs verkopen om de schuldenlast te verlichten.

Heineken zou 300 miljoen pond (350 miljoen euro) willen betalen om de 300 pubs te redden. De bierbrouwer exploiteert in Groot-Brittannië al ongeveer 2350 pubs onder de vlag van Star Pubs & Bars en brouwt er biermerken zoals Birra Moretti, Amstel en Cruzcampo.

Stonegate exploiteert ongeveer 4500 pubs in het hele land, maar probeert 1000 toplocaties te verkopen om kapitaal vrij te maken. De enorme schuldenlast die op de pubketen drukt, ontstond grotendeels toen het bedrijf in 2019 concurrent Enterprise Inns overnam voor 3 miljard pond. Hierdoor zat het horecabedrijf opgescheept met enorme leningen, vlak voordat de pandemie de Britse pubs dwong maandenlang de deuren te sluiten.

On July 10 2026, a life insurance company called TruStage had a "cybersecurity incident". According to an update posted five days later, when they revealed the incident, they are "continuing to work carefully and urgently to understand the facts, and the company will communicate appropriately as its understanding of the situation evolves."

This work, according to their outage page (last updated on September 11th, at the time of this writing), is continuing. Every major business function is listed as "partially available". They have some text explaining that they can't simply turn the system back on, because safety.

They don't know what data was compromised. They don't know when they'll have everything back up. As of mid-August they had gotten so far as setting up a "clean" environment that they could start migrating services to. The only good news is that some of their services are supplied to credit unions for banking, and those were on different systems, so only their insurance packages were compromised. I also suspect the fact that they serve credit unions is the only thing keeping the business afloat, because failing to handle transactions for months seems like a terminal event for most businesses.

Obviously, this also means they're embroiled in an ever growing number of lawsuits from a variety of parties. It also highlights something about how insurance works: it's middlemen all the way down.

TruStage will issue policies, but their connection to the actual policy holder will likely be routed through a number of different partners. Like, for example, Ethos.

Ethos uses "AI" to "democratize" insurance. Feed your data into their AI, and in minutes they'll pair you up with a policy. Which, while using machine learning to do things like assess insurance risk seems like a pretty reasonable idea, in this age of AI hype, one has to wonder how this actually is implemented and how it works in practice.

But Ethos isn't the end of the chain! Other companies live downstream from Ethos, for example, Family First Life. A customer might reach out to FFL to get a policy, FFL reaches out to Ethos (or one of many other partners), and Ethos reaches out to one of its partners (TruStage being one of their largest), and boom: an insurance happens. Like I said, it's middlemen all the way down.

But now, here's the problem: TruStage issued a bunch of policies, and then stopped being able to do business. They stopped being able to do even vital things, like process payments. And you know what happens when payments aren't made on a life insurance policy? It lapses. It goes away. You no longer have insurance. And the agents who sell those policies are often paid a commission based on the value of the first few months of the policy's life (since life insurance is expected to be a long term investment). If the policy lapses, those commissions vanish, companies like Ethos (or downstream partners like FFL) get chargebacks on the value of those failed policies.

This makes some people, like FFL's President, Shawn Meaike, very unhappy.

What we have here is a pretty egregious failure of cybersecurity and disaster recovery on the part of TruStage. It's an embarrassing and potentially terminal event for them. It's awful for the customers who bought insurance policies to give themselves peace of mind, only to discover their policies lapse because TruStage can't take their money. It's creating mild chaos in the entire industry. That's all interesting, but not why I wanted to write an article about this. I wanted to write about the incredible cringe.

In this clip from an insurance industry conference, Meaike brings up all of their partners for a "carrier panel". He then proceeds to line them up from stage right to stage left, ranking them as "weakest" to "strongest". Ethos, who sells TruStage policies, is labeled as the weakest.

"You have the weakest leg," he says, pointing at the reps from Ethos, to laughter from the audience, and then indicates the other side of the line represents "the strongest leg." Meaike hands the microphone to an Ethos employee, Dylan Cummings, "We'll start with you."

"I want to start out by thanking everyone," Cummings says.

Meaike cuts him off. "Hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm gonna help you. Why don't you start by saying you're sorry."

The crowd yells out, "Yes!" and applauds this idea.

"Say 'We have a carrier that's shut down'," Meakie continues, "'and I'm mother-freaking sorry.'"

Yes, he said "mother-freaking", on stage.

So let's recap. An insurance company gets pwned so hard they can't run operations for months. People's policies lapse, simply because they can't give their money to the insurance company. Which 100% sucks for those customers, though at least with life insurance we expect very few of them are missing their payout- hopefully! This chain cascades through the network of partners, until it culminates in the president of one company publicly humiliating the senior account manager at a middleman company, during an industry conference.

Nobody comes off looking particularly good here, obviously. Meakie is a jerk. TruStage is institutionally incompetent. Ethos is in a bit of a rock-and-a-hard-place situation, and Cummings is trying to do his best to tap dance his way out of oblivion, but it seems like the AI driven insurance startup just isn't a good partner even before their main issuer died.

All in all, it feels like a Tim Robinson sketch, or perhaps a Nathan Fielder bit. We're one step away from Meakie calling Cummings a "Wizard of Loneliness."

Acceptatie van homoseksualiteit onder jongeren is fors gedaald. "Schrikbarend", concludeert het COC. Nu vinden 'jongeren met een migratieachtergrond' homoseksualiteit altijd al haram, maar autochtone jongeren zijn die lui nu aan het na-broeren. "Waarom jongeren conservatiever zijn gaan denken, is niet duidelijk." Aha, de onderzoekers hebben geen idee, dus zal het wel de manosfeer zijn! DE MANOSFEER! Ook meiden zijn een stuk minder tolerant geworden ten opzichte van homoseksualiteit: een daling van 78 naar 51 procent. Hoe dát kan? Tsja, geen idee. De manosfeer misschien?

Oooooh dan

"Het rapport noemt ook positieve zaken. Zo eet de jeugd vaker fruit."

Een lezer vroeg me:

De school waar ik werk bestaat binnenkort 100 jaar. Ter gelegenheid daarvan wordt onder andere een reünie georganiseerd. Ter gelegenheid daarvan diepte een van mijn collega’s oude administratiemappen op met adresgegevens van oud-leerlingen: naam, adres en telefoonnummer en, van de recentere lichtingen, e-mailadressen. Wellicht verouderd, maar toch handig, vonden we. De FG kreeg een hartverzakking en zei dat we die gegevens allang hadden moeten vernietigen. Dit zou het ons onmogelijk maken vele oud-leerlingen blij te maken met de reünie. Is de wet echt zo hard?

De AVG kent inderdaad de harde regel dat persoonsgegevens weg moeten tenzij er nog een reden is om ze te behouden. En die reden moet in je beleid uitgewerkt zijn, enkel op het moment zelf een gelegenheidsargument verzinnen of algemene “handig voor je weet nooit” uitspraken zijn daarbij niet genoeg.

Zo te lezen gaat het hier om documenten van voor 2018, en mogelijk zelfs van voor 2001 toen de Wet bescherming persoonsgegevens in werking trad. Goed begrijpelijk dat die mappen dan al die tijd over het hoofd gezien zijn, maar dat betekent niet dat ze nu buiten de AVG vallen. Ze moeten dus vernietigd.

Echter, ik zou weinig kwaads zien in het eerst nog eenmalig sturen van een brief of mail van die oud-leerlingen gezien het bijzondere karakter van een 100-jarig jubileum. De gegevens zijn geen radioactief afval dat onmiddellijk weg moet, maar persoonsgegevens waar wat mee moet gebeuren.

Een honderdjarig jubileum is uitzonderlijk, en een eenmalige uitnodiging voor een reünie is voor een oud-leerling ook geen volstrekt onverwacht gebruik van zijn oude adresgegevens. Zeker bij naam en adres zie ik weinig privacyrisico. Ik zou daarom een korte belangenafweging vastleggen en de lijst uitsluitend voor deze ene uitnodigingsronde gebruiken. Geen verrijking via databrokers, geen adressen gaan napluizen als mensen verhuisd blijken, geen opname in een permanente alumnimarketingdatabase.

Zet in de uitnodiging bovendien gewoon eerlijk waar het adres vandaan komt: “Uw contactgegevens komen uit onze oude leerlingenadministratie. We gebruiken deze eenmalig vanwege het honderdjarig bestaan; daarna verwijderen we ze.” Adressen die niet blijken te kloppen gaan meteen weg. Na afloop wordt de hele lijst vernietigd, behalve van mensen die zelf aangeven voortaan als alumnus op de hoogte te willen blijven.

Historisch relevante stukken hoeven niet per se mee de papierversnipperaar in. Denk aan oude klassenfoto’s of een enkel representatief schoolrapport, zaken die een beeld geven van de geschiedenis van de school. Ook foto’s waarop nog levende oud-leerlingen staan, kunnen prima in een zorgvuldig beheerd historisch schoolarchief worden bewaard.

Dat betekent overigens niet dat je ze vervolgens zonder nadenken op de jubileumwebsite mag zetten: bewaren in een archief en opnieuw publiceren zijn twee verschillende verwerkingen. Een compromis dat ik zelf wel heb gezien, is dat de klassenfoto’s uitvergroot op de reünie zelf worden opgehangen zodat de aanwezigen zichzelf en elkaar terug kunnen zien.

Arnoud

Het bericht Mag onze school de oud-leerlingen voor een reunie benaderen met teruggevonden administratiemappen? verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.