Gandi Events July 2016

This month for Gandi Events, we wrapped up the first round of scheduled talks at our The Root Zone. meetup we’ve been coordinating with Cloudflare. Guests have included Paul Mockapetris, Dan Kaminsky, and Paul Vixie. We’ve found that this first round went quite well, so we’re now looking to schedule a second round as soon as we can.

 The Root Zone. with Paul Vixie

On June 21, we welcomed Paul Vixie to our offices in San Francisco. Paul explained how he wrote BIND version 8 by patching bugs while at DEC and then recruited and managed the team that wrote BIND 9. He described how he’s seen DNS go from something nobody ever thought of themselves as “in the business of” (BIND “looked as though it had been pounded on by a bunch of undergraduate monkeys”) to being a business in and of itself, and how he went from never having read an RFC in his life to repeating the mantra “If you can get an RFC approved, I’ll take a patch, if you don’t I won’t,” for anyone requesting a patch to BIND.

Then he went on to talk about building ISC, the YETI DNS project, why domain names don’t have underscores, and rounded out the main portion of his visit with some talk about spam (he feels partly responsible for how widespread it is because he slowed it down enough that we call got used to it).

A highlight in the lightning round Q&A section was when Paul was asked about the coolest takedown he’s been a part of. He then described his role in taking down a group of cyber criminals who managed to hijack 600,000 people’s DNS resolution through a change route.

Altogether, a fascinating talk, filled with plenty of other gems from Paul not mentioned in this summary. So really, you might as well just watch it. Here’s the video:

With Paul’s visit last month, The Root Zone. talks are, for the moment, complete. We are, however, seeking future speakers for the next series. So if you or someone you know—friends, family, bosses, loved ones, or anybody else you think would make for an interesting guest speaker on DNS—send them our way! Tweet us @gandibar with #TheRootZone.

Otherwise, be sure to watch out on the meetup page for more information and update.