Aplomb

In addition to sporting the most impressive unibrow since Bert Paul Vixie, has a pretty incredible tech résumé. So much so that he was inducted into the Int ernet Hall of Fame in 2014. A good deal of his body of work has been in the space of security, as his IHoF nickname “Internet Sheriff” would seem to indicate.

…but I think my favorite of his contributions is this single email.

It is in reply to some punk asking a deliberately incendiary question, just dripping with snark: Was DNS intentionally designed to be insecure?

Now, Vixie could’ve gone all Hub McCann on him - he’s decidedly got the cred to do so - but he didn’t. He took the high road and responded with utmost grace and gravitas. There is zero fat on his reply; every sentence carries weight and most are utterly quotable on their own.

The world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980’s.

Nothing that can be abused won’t be.

Putting the full spectrum of human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster.

Good on you, Mr. Vixie. That last one in particular gives me chills, and is a helpful reminder when I’m mad at computers for computering that the problem m ay not have been the computers in the first place. Perhaps it was the Human Beings all along.