Paul V. Mockapetris, new Doctor Honoris Causa of the URL by proposal of La Salle

Paul V. Mockapetris, inventor of the DNS and father of the modern Internet, was invested as Doctor Honoris Causa by the University Ramon Llull by proposal of La Salle. The conference room of La Salle-URL was the venue of the ceremony. The Internet pioneer carried out a pedagogical speech focused on lessons he considers long lasting: "I always tell my students that if they want their work to be remembered in a century, that they must write, paint, create music or art in general, but not technology. It will be complicated anyway, but as much as I admire the principles of Ethernet, I am convinced that no one will remember it in 2100, but Mozart or the Rolling Stones continue to be remembered." Guiomar Corral, academic director of Engineering La Salle-URL remarked that it was in 1983 that Internet adopted the current technology coinciding with the year that Mockapetris created the DNS protocol (Domain Name System). A technology responsible for assigning a name domain to a specific address that prevents users from having to remember complicated addresses with numbers, points or directories, and that remains critical after more than 30 years after its birth. Currently, there are more than 3,200 million Internet users in the world (of which about 1,500 million are active users of Facebook). This generates a daily traffic of about 2,600 exabytes, about 210,000 million emails sent every day, more than 4,000 million daily searches in Google, more than 9 billion videos displayed on YouTube, more than 240 million photos uploaded every day on Instagram and 900 million tweets daily, just to mention some of the currently more widely known applications. The strength of the users, the common denominator of Internet Success. During his speech, Mockapetris underlined the important role of users to the Internet that we know today: "In the Internet world there is the belief that all came true thanks to a character or a particular idea, but it seems to me that it was the inevitable explosion of this tsunami of resources. Internet protocols were prepared, readily available and could be used by any user community, not just a particular supplier ". "More than half of the attempts to use DNS for new features were not successful, because the designers did not understand the real needs of society and because the ones who had to enter the necessary data for configuration did not see the advantage. The mail system for DNS works because people demand this service and, if you do not configure it, you stop receiving mail. I usually say I built the basement and ground floor of the DNS but today it is a building of 50 plants, "Mockapetris said. "We have to recognize the costs of Internet security" "I will never visit all Internet websites, and I do not add any value to the ones I don't visit. Even more, the Internet is useful to criminals, spies and those who seek to threaten or destroy. In this case, giving them the ability to access is no benefit to me. Mockapetris has been that sincere and for him "it is tempting to blame the academics who built the infrastructure for neglecting safety" and he stated "as the architect of DNS I didn’t even try to incorporate security consciously." He added: "If we want security and privacy on the Internet, society must understand that this is not free: it has a real monetary cost, a real cost of comfort and a real cost of slower development of new technology." 50 years of the first studies of Telecommunications in Catalonia Guiomar Corral, academic director of Engineering La Salle-URL: "When Telecommunications studies began at La Salle 50 years ago, the Internet did not exist and the embryo of the network we know today, of which Mockapetris has been and remains one of the most prominent drivers, was in gestation. Mockapetris is one of the most important architects of the revolution in the world of networks, computing and telecommunications and his contributions have been instrumental to the early ARPANET network, created in the late 60s of the twentieth century, evolving into the Internet we know today. " Josep Maria Garrell, Rector of the URL: La Salle contributed and continues to contribute to new generations of graduates who wish to be at the front of what we now call the Information Society Technologies ". You can see pictures of the event here