Three years ago, I started building a decentralized web because I was worried about the future of our internet.
三年前, 我開始建造一個份散式網路, 因為我擔心我們網際網路的未來。
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.
目前我們使用的網路, 重點在於守門人。 如果你想要到網路上的某個地方, 你就得要經過好幾個中間人。 首先是 DNS(網域名稱伺服器), 接著是伺服器代管公司, 它通常會將你指引向第三方, 一個網頁寄存服務。 每當你想要到網路上的一個網站, 就會發生上述的流程。
But these gatekeepers are vulnerable to internet attacks
但這些守門人易受網路攻擊,
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.
而且他們對審查和監視 也越來越隨心所欲。 而情況正在變糟。 什麼都被放上雲端, 雲端的資料是由大型企業來代管。 移動到雲端的現象,創造出了 許多更強大的中間人。 移到雲端是合理的, 因為這種方式對於 開發者及服務商來說 比較容易也比較便宜。 他們不用擔心要維護實體的伺服器。 我不怪他們,但我發現 這個趨勢是非常危險的, 因為,這麼一來,這些大型企業 對於主機代管服務 就有無限的控制權。
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?"
這種權力是非常容易被濫用的。 比如,去年,一間公司的執行長 身為九百萬個網站的守門人, 在受到一些公眾壓力之後, 他決定他們所管理的其中一個 極右派網站,應該要被封鎖。 接著,他發了一封內部 電子郵件給他的同事們。 「這是一個霸道的決定。 我今天早上起床時心情很差, 但還是決定要把它們踢下網路。」 即使他承認: 「沒有人應該擁有這種權力。」 有一位員工回應,問他: 「這是網際網路的忌日嗎?」
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.
我不認為我們在殺害網際網路, 但我確實認為我們正處於一種 不可靠的中心化過程當中, 這過程讓我們的網際網路更加脆弱。 分散式,人對人的網路 能夠移除網頁寄存服務的中繼點, 進而解決這個問題。 它把權力賦予使用者, 讓他們能擁有他們 想要保存的主機網站。 在這個網路上,網站會 直接被訪客下載下來。 意思就是,若一個網站 有一百個訪客, 它就是由全世界的 一百台電腦來代管。 基本上,這是一種以人 為動力的新版網際網路。 網路安全性是由公開的 金鑰加密方式來提供的。 這樣確保其他人不能修改這些網站, 只有真正的網站所有人可以。 可以把它想像成,我們不再 從大型發電廠取得電力, 改成在你自己的屋頂上裝太陽能板, 如果你同條路上的鄰居 需要一些額外的能源, 他們可以從你的房子下載一些來用。 所以,使用分散化的網路, 我們有助於讓內容維持在 其他訪客可以取得的狀態。 這麼說的意思就是, 我們也能夠對抗 我們認為不公正的事物, 比如審查制度。
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.
在中國,網際網路受到嚴密控制。 他們不能批評政府, 策劃抗議, 也禁止張貼 追思天安門受害者的表情符號。 若有分散化的網站,政府就無法決定 什麼能被看見、什麼不能, 而是由人決定, 這使得網路更民主, 同時還會更難用這網路 來做一些明顯犯法的事情, 在世界各地都一樣, 因為使用者可能並不想要 因為代管這些有問題的內容 而讓自己陷入危險。
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.
還有另一項對網際網路的自由 越來越嚴重的威脅, 就是過度規範管控。 我覺得 我們的代表, 對網際網路法規進行投票的代表, 並不完全清楚了解他們的決定。 比如,歐洲議會正討論一條新法, 一條新的版權保護法, 其中有一部分叫做「十三條款」。 如果通過的話, 它會要求每一個大型網站 都要導入一個過濾器, 它會根據大企業所控制的規則 來自動阻擋某些內容。 原本的想法是要保護有版權的素材, 但它會危及到我們在網際網路上 做的許多其他事情: 寫網誌、批評、討論、 連結,和分享。 Google 和 YouTube 已經有類似的系統, 它們每小時會收到十萬則 要求下架的請求。 當然,它們不可能用人工 來處理這麼大的量, 所以它們採用機器學習, 來決定是否有違反版權的狀況。 但這些過濾器會犯錯。 它們什麼都移除, 濫用人權的紀錄, 觸及版權的演講, 以及搜尋到的 批評這新「十三條款」的結果。 此外,它們還會移除許多其它東西。
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.
有時,這些過濾器 並不只是移除特定的內容, 也有可能會讓你失去你連結的帳戶、 你的電子郵件地址、 你的文件、你的照片, 或你寫到一半的書, 作家丹尼斯庫珀就遇到了這種事。
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.
不難想像,像這樣的系統 能被政客和企業競爭者濫用。 「十三條款」就是 在將這些自動過濾器 延伸到整個網際網路上, 它遭受強烈反彈, 抗議者包括維基、GitHub、 Mozilla,及許多其他人, 包括網際網路和全球 資訊網的原始創始人, 文頓瑟夫與提姆柏內茲李。 但,儘管有強烈的反彈, 在最後一次的歐洲國會投票上, 三分之二的代表支持這項法律。 最後一次投票會在 2019 年初。 其結果極其重要, 但不論發生什麼事, 我很確定,全世界會有許多 其它類似的提案跟進。
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.
透過分散化的網路, 這些規定會非常難執行, 因為沒有代管公司。 網站是由訪客自己來服務的。
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.
我三年前開始建造這個網路。 從那時起,我已經花了數千、 數萬小時在開發上。 為什麼? 為什麼會有人花數千小時 去做任何人都能自由複製、 重新命名,甚至銷售的東西呢? 嗯,就我來說, 理由之一是我想要做有意義的事。 我平日的工作是網路開發者, 我不覺得我的工作產出 有機會變得比我更大。 簡單地說,我只想讓 我在這世上的短暫存在 變得有意義。
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,中國的防火長城 開始阻擋我創造的網路。 這一舉動正式使我成為 政府支持的互聯網審查的敵人。 從那之後,就成了貓捉老鼠的遊戲。 他們在防火牆上建立新的規則, 我則是盡快做出對策, 讓使用者能夠繼續 代管內容和創建網站, 要不然,就會被中心化的 中國網際網路給審查。
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.
我創立這個網路的 另一個動機是擔憂。 我擔心我們網際網路的未來 將不受我們控制。 越來越嚴重的中心化 以及被提出的法律 都在威脅我們的言論自由, 進而威脅我們的民主。 所以,對我來說, 建造去中心化的網路 就意味著創造一個安全港, 在這個空間中, 規則不由大企業和政黨所寫, 而是由人民所寫的。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)