Paul Vixie: Story of an Internet Hero

Paul Vixie grew up in San Francisco. He dropped out of high school in 1980. He worked on the first Internet gateways at DEC and, from there, started the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), establishing Internet protocols, particularly the Domain Name System (DNS). Today, Vixie is one of the few dozen in the technology world with the title "distinguished engineer," working at Amazon Web Services as vice president of security, where he believes he can make the Internet a more safe place. As safe as before the Internet emerged. "I am worried about how much less safe we all are in the Internet era than we were before," Vixie said in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin earlier this month for The New Stack Makers podcast. "And everything is connected, and very little is understood. And so, my mission for the last 20 years has been to restore human safety to pre-internet levels. And doing that at scale is quite the challenge. It'll take me a lifetime."