Three years ago, I started building a decentralized web because I was worried about the future of our internet.
三年前, 我开始着手建立一个去中心化网络, 因为我很担心互联网的未来。
The current internet we are using is about gatekeepers. If you want to reach something on the web, then you need to go through multiple middlemen. First, a domain name server, then a server hosting company, which usually points you to a third party, to a web hosting service. And this happens every time you want to reach a website on the web.
我们现在使用的网络就像守门人。 如果你想进入某个网站, 需要通过好几个中间人。 先是一个域名服务器, 接着是一个服务器托管商, 它通常把你指引给一个第三方, 去访问网站托管服务。 每次你想访问网络上的一个网址, 都会经历这样的过程。
But these gatekeepers are vulnerable to internet attacks
但是这些守门人容易遭受网络攻击,
and also makes the censorship and the surveillance easier. And the situation is getting worse. Everything is moving to the cloud, where the data is hosted by giant corporations. This move creates much, much more powerful middlemen. Now, move to the cloud makes sense because this way it's easier and cheaper for the developers and the service operators. They don't have to worry about maintaining the physical servers. I can't blame them, but I found this trend to be very dangerous, because this way, these giant corporations have unlimited control over the hosting services.
也使审查和监管更轻而易举。 而且这种情况正在变得越来越严重。 一切都在向网络云端转移, 由大公司来托管上面的数据。 这一变动创造出更多、 更有权力的中间人。 向云端转移合情合理, 因为对开发商和服务运营商来说, 这种方式更简便、更廉价。 他们无需为维护物理服务器操心。 我不能指责他们, 但是我发现这种趋势很危险, 因为通过这种方式,这些大公司 对托管服务拥有无限的控制权。
And it's very easy to abuse this power. For example, last year, a CEO of a company that acts as a gatekeeper for nine million websites decided, after some public pressure, that one of the sites it manages, a far right page, should be blocked. He then sent an internal email to his coworkers. "This was an arbitrary decision. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet." Even he admits, "No one should have this power." As a response, one of the employees asked him, "Is this the day the Internet dies?"
这很容易就会导致权力的滥用。 例如去年, 一家为900万个网站 担当守门人的网络公司, 其CEO迫于公众压力 决定封锁公司管理的其中一个网站, 一个极右翼的网站界面。 紧接着他给同事发了一封内部邮件。 “这是一个武断的决定。 今早醒来时我的心情很糟, 就决定把它们赶出互联网。” 他甚至自己也承认, “没人应该拥有这种权力。” 一位员工回复了他并问道, “今天是互联网死亡日吗?”
I don't think we are actually killing the internet, but I do think that we are in the middle of a kind of irresponsible centralization process that makes our internet more fragile. The decentralized, people-to-people web solves this problem by removing the central points, the web-hosting services. It empowers the users to have host sites they want to preserve. On this network, the sites get downloaded directly from other visitors. This means, if you have a site with 100 visitors, then it's hosted [by] 100 computers around the world. Basically, this is a people-powered version of the internet. The security of the network is provided by public-key cryptography. This makes sure that no one can modify the sites but only the real owner. Think of it like instead of getting electricity from big power plants, you put solar panels on top of your house, and if your neighbor down the street needs some extra energy, then they can just download some from your house. So by using the decentralized web, we can help to keep content accessible for other visitors. And by that, it means that we can also fight against things that we feel are unjust, like censorship.
我不认为我们正在消灭互联网, 但是我确信 我们正身处一种 不负责任的集权化进程中, 它令我们的网络更脆弱。 而去中心化、人对人网络 可以通过取消中心点、 取消网站托管服务来 解决这个问题。 它使用户能够 拥有他们想保留的托管网站。 在这个网络中,可以直接 从其他访客那里下载网站。 这意味着,如果 你的网站有100个访客, 那它就由来自世界各地的 100台计算机托管。 这基本上就是一个 以人为本的网络, 由公钥加密系统保障网络安全。 这可以确保除真正的所有者外, 没人能修改网站。 这就像你不通过 大型发电站,而是在屋顶 放几块太阳能板来发电, 如果街坊邻居需要额外能源, 他们就能从你的屋里下载一些。 所以利用去中心化网络, 我们可以帮助其他访客获取内容。 这也就意味着 我们也能够对抗 那些我们觉得不公平的事情, 例如审查制度。
In China, the internet is tightly controlled. They can't criticize the government, organize a protest, and it's also forbidden to post a kind of emoticon to remember the victims of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. With the decentralized web, it's not the government that decides what gets seen and what doesn't. It's the people, which makes the web more democratic. But at the same time, it's hard to use this network to do something that is clearly illegal everywhere in the world, as the users probably don't want to endanger themselves hosting these kinds of problematic content.
在中国,网络被严密控制。 人们不能批评政府, 组织抗议, 还被禁止在网上发布 一种纪念天安门广场大屠杀 罹难者的表情符号。 但在去中心化网络中, 不再由政府来决定 什么能被看到,什么不能被看到, 而由人民来决定, 这让网络更民主。 同时,也很难利用这个网络 进行世界上流行的 非法行为, 因为用户大概也不想因为 托管这类有问题的内容 而危及自身。
Another increasing threat to internet freedom is overregulation. I have the impression that our delegates who vote on the internet regulation laws are not fully aware of their decisions. For example, the European Parliament has a new law on the table, a new copyright protection law, that has a part called Article 13. If it passes, it would require every big website to implement a filter that automatically blocks content based on rules controlled by big corporations. The original idea is to protect copyrighted materials, but it would endanger many other things we do on the internet: blogging, criticizing, discussing, linking and sharing. Google and YouTube already have similar systems and they are receiving 100,000 takedown requests every hour. Of course, they can't process this amount of data by hand, so they are using machine learning to decide if it's really a copyright violation or not. But these filters do make mistakes. They're removing everything from documentation of human rights abuses, lectures about copyrights and search results that point to criticism of this new Article 13. Beside of that, they are also removing many other things.
另一个日益加剧的 对网络自由的威胁 就是过度监管。 我感觉 我们那些 投票表决网络监管法案的代表们 并不完全清楚自己的决定。 比如,欧洲议会在讨论一项新法案, 一项新的版权保护法案, 其中一部分被称为第13条。 如果这条通过, 将会要求所有大型网站 部署过滤器, 基于大公司制定的规则 自动阻止内容。 它的初衷是保护版权资料, 但也会危及我们在网上 做的很多其他事情: 发博客、批评、讨论、建立链接和共享。 谷歌和YouTube已经有类似的系统, 每小时可收到10万个删稿请求。 当然,它们无法人工处理 如此庞大的数据, 所以它们利用机器学习 来判别内容是否侵权。 但是这些过滤器也会出错。 它们无所不删, 从侵犯人权的纪录片, 知识产权讲座, 到关于新第13条的 批评性言论的网络搜索结果。 此外,它们还会删除其他许多内容。
And sometimes, these filters aren't just removing the specific content, but it could also lead to loss of your linked accounts: your email address, your documents, your photos, or your unfinished book, which happened with the writer Dennis Cooper.
有时,这些过滤器 不只删除特定内容, 还会导致你的关联账户信息丢失: 你的电子邮箱地址、文件、照片 或者尚未完成的书, 作家丹尼斯 · 库伯 就遇到过这样的糟心事。
It's not hard to see how a system like this could be abused by politicians and corporate competitors. This Article 13, the extension of these automated filters to the whole internet, got strong opposition from Wikipedia, Github, Mozilla, and many others, including the original founders of the internet and the World Wide Web, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. But despite this strong opposition, on the last European Parliament vote, two thirds of the representatives supported this law. The final vote will be early 2019. The result is important, but whatever happens, I'm pretty sure it will be followed by many other similar proposals around the world.
不难看出这样一个系统是如何 被政客和公司的竞争对手滥用的。 第13条将自动过滤器的实施 扩大到整个互联网, 此举遭到维基百科、Github、Mozilla, 以及包括万维网创始人 温特 · 瑟夫和蒂姆 · 伯纳斯-李 在内的多名人士的强烈反对。 然而,尽管遭到强烈反对, 在上一轮欧洲议会投票中, 仍有三分之二的代表支持这项法案。 最终轮投票将于2019年初进行。 结果很重要, 但无论结果怎样, 我都非常确定,在全世界 范围内将会出现许多 类似的后续提案。
These kinds of regulations would be very hard to enforce through a decentralized web, as there is no hosting companies. The websites are served by the visitors themselves.
这类监管法规很难在 去中心化网络上实行, 因为去中心化网络中没有托管公司。 网站由访客自己托管。
I started to build this network three years ago. Since then, I've spent thousands, tens of thousands of hours on the development. Why? Why would anyone spend thousands of hours on something anyone can freely copy, rename, or even sell? Well, in my case, one of the reasons was to do something meaningful. During my daily regular job as a web developer, I didn't have the feeling that I'm working on something that had a chance to be a bigger than me. Simply, I just wanted to make my short presence in this world to be meaningful.
我在三年前开始建立这个网络。 从那时算起,我已经在研发方面花费了 成千上万个小时。 为什么呢? 为什么有人花成千上万个小时 在一个人人都能自由拷贝、 重命名,甚至是售卖的东西上? 对我来说, 其中一个原因就是 做这件事情有意义。 我是一名网站开发员, 日常工作中我并没有感觉到 自己在做一些超出 个人意义范畴的事情。 我只是想让自己短暂的一生 过得有意义。
Last year, the Great Firewall of China started blocking this network I created. This move officially made me the enemy of the government-supported internet censorship. Since then, it's been really a game of cat and mouse. They make new rules in the firewall and I try to react to it as fast as I can so the users can keep hosting content and create websites that otherwise would be censored by the centralized Chinese internet.
去年,中国的防火墙 开始屏蔽我创建的这个网络。 这一动作因此正式将我和 由政府支持的网络审查结为冤家。 从此,真正的猫鼠游戏开始了。 他们制定了新的防火墙规则, 那我就尽全力快速应对, 以便让用户能保存 托管内容并创建网站, 否则再慢一点就会被 集权化的中国网络审查。
My other motivation to create this network was worry. I fear that the future of our internet is out of our control. The increasing centralization and the proposed laws are threatening our freedom of speech and, by that, our democracy. So for me, building a decentralized web means creating a safe harbor, a space where the rules are not written by big corporations and political parties, but by the people.
我创建这个网络的 另一个原因是出于一种担忧。 我担心网络的未来发展会失控。 日渐增多的网络集权和法律提案 正在威胁我们的自由发言权, 也就是民主权。 所以对我来说, 建立一个去中心化网络 意味着创造一个安全的避风港, 在那里,规则不再由 大公司和政治团体制定, 而是由人民。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(鼓掌)