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TED英语演讲视频:The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B(附视频+双语演讲稿)

TED是Technology, Entertainment, Design(科技、娱乐、设计)的缩写,这个会议的宗旨是"用思想的力量来改变世界"。TED演讲的特点是毫无繁杂冗长的专业讲座,观点响亮,开门见山,种类繁多,看法新颖。而且还是非常好的英语口语听力练习材料,建议坚持学习。


TED演讲视频:The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B


TED英语演讲视频介绍

在1970年代和1980年代,互联网充满了慷慨的精神,那时互联网用户数量少,而且相距遥远。但如今,网络无处不在,它将数以十亿的用户、机器和重要的基础设施紧紧的联结在一起。让让我们非常容易受到网络攻击或崩溃。互联网先锋丹尼 希利斯认为互联网不是为这样的规模设计的,为我们吹响了设计B计划的号角:一个在互联网失效或者崩溃时可以运作的并行系统。


演说者:Danny Hillis

演说题目:The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?width=500&height=375&auto=0&vid=p0161o2kf2s


演讲稿



So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. 

呃,我手里的这本书是1982年所有拥有电邮地址的人的通讯录。它看起来很大,其实不然。这本通讯录实际上每页只记录了大约20个人,因为我们每一个人都有自己的姓名,地址和电话号码。同时,每个人的信息都出现了两次,因为有两种排序方式:根据名字和根据电子邮件地址。


Obviously a very small community. There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. I knew them both. We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.

当然这是个很小的社区。当时,互联网上只有另外两个名字也叫丹尼的人。他们两个我都认识。虽然我们彼此之间并不全都认识,但是我们互相信任,这种基本的信任感充满了整个网络,并且大家可以感觉到我们能彼此信赖的去完成一些事情。


So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. 

因此,为了让你们能体会到当时该社区的那种信任程度,下面让我来告诉你在早期是如何注册域名的。现在,假象我我刚注册了我的第三个互联网域名。


So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. And then I thought, "Nah, that wouldn't be very nice."

于是我可以起任何我想要的名字作为域名,除了"bbn.com"和"symbolics.com"之外。于是我注册了"think.com",但是我又想,除此之外还有很多有趣的域名。也许我应该多注册几个以备不时之需。我又想:“呐,这样不太好吧。”


That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days, and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network, but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself. So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol, and the way that the -- the routing algorithm that used it, were fundamentally "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." 

在那时,这种只取己需的态度在网络上几乎人人拥有,而且事实上,不仅仅是使用网络的人有这种态度,这种态度也植根于互联网协议自身。所以,I.P.,或者互联网协议的基本思想,以及路由算法用到的工作方式,从根本上来说是“各尽其能,各取所需。” 


And so, if you had some extra bandwidth, you'd deliver a message for someone. If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you. You'd kind of depend on people to do that, and that was the building block. It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet. It was incredibly successful.

因此,如果你有额外的带宽,你代别人发送信息。如果他们也有额外的带宽,他们也可以代你发送信息。你将会逐渐依靠于他人才能来完成信息的交换,而这就是构建的基石。有趣的是,虽然这样一个共产原则,居然是国防部在冷战期间开发的一个系统的核心,而很明显它的效果非常好,我们已经目睹了互联网发生的一切。毋庸置疑,非常的成功。


In fact, it was so successful that there's no way that these days you could make a book like this. My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick. But, of course, you couldn't do it, because we don't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses, and even if we did know their names, I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name, address and telephone number published to everyone.

实际上,互联网如此成功,以至于如今你不可能出版这样一本通讯录了。我粗略计算,如果这本书出版出来将会有25英尺厚。当然,你也做不不出来,因为我们不知道所有上网人的名字,或者电子邮件地址,即使我们知道他们的名字,我确信他们也不愿意将他们的名字,地址和电话号码公诸于众。


So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust. 

事实是当今在互联网上有很多坏人,我们的应对方法是建立一个封闭的社区,安全子网,虚拟私有网,以及类似于因特网但又不是因特网的工具,虽然他们拥有相同的构建原理, 但是我们构建他们并不完全照搬因特网的构建基本原理,而是基于与因特网一样,对信任的假设。


And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad.

这意味着这种网络易受到某种可能发生的某种错误的干扰,以及受某种蓄意的攻击,但是即使是错误,也会很麻烦。


So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. 

例如,最近在亚洲的所有地区,有一小段时间不能访问YouTube 因为巴基斯坦在其内部网络审查YouTube的方法上犯了一些错误。他们无意于在亚洲墙掉Youtube,但由于的协议工作方式,他们确实短时间内阻断了Youtube。


Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it. Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't. 

另一个可能会影响很多在座听众的例子是,你可能还记得在数年前,密西西比州西部的所有飞机停航了,是因为盐湖城的一个路由卡出现了问题。你当然不会认为飞机系统依赖于因特网,在某种意义上它确实不依靠因特网。


I'll come back to that later. But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down.

稍后我会再谈到这一点。事实是人们不能起飞,是因为互联网出了某种问题,路由卡宕机了。


And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April. All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. So for a few hours, it all passed through China. 

许多类似的事情在不断的发生。去年四月发生了一件有趣的事情。突然,整个互联网上相当大量的流量,包括美国军方网络的很多流量,开始通过中国改道发送。在数小时内,这些流量经由中国。


Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.

中国电信声称这并非有意为之,很可能确实如此,事实就是这样但毫无疑问的是如果有人 蓄意这样做,那也很容易。这表明在面临错误时,系统是如何脆弱。顾设想面临蓄意攻击时,系统该是多么脆弱啊。


So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks. That will not succeed. What they'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility. Nobody has claimed credit for that. 

现在,如果有人蓄意攻击美国或者西方社会,他们不会采用坦克。当然这样做也不会成功。他们可能采取的行动会非常类似于针对伊朗核设施发动的攻击。没有人会声称对此负责。


There was basically a factory of industrial machines. It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet. It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges, in that case, to actually destroy themselves. 

基本上那只是一个制造工业机器的工厂,它自己不会认为自己在互联网上。它自己认为自己是与互联网隔离的,但是有可能有人偷偷带进了一个U盘或类似U盘的东西,和软件潜入工厂,让工厂里的离心分离机自毁。 


Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant. And so there's a lot of -- I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyber attacks and defenses against those.

由于当今有类似的软件可以摧毁一家炼油厂、制药厂,或者半导体工厂。所以人们不免有许多--我相信你们在报纸上也看了很多,有关网络攻击和对网络攻击的防御的担忧。


But the fact is, people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile. So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it. 

但事实上,人们主要着眼于联网电脑的保护,反而极少关注作为通讯介质的互联网本身的保护。 我认为我们需要更多的关注这一点,因为互联网是脆弱的。事实上,在早期,在阿帕网年代,事实上确实有发生过一次整个网络完全宕掉了一段时间的情况,原因是某个单一信息处理器有问题。


And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time. So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it. So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy, who would send it back in time and get it there super early, so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node, and of course that clogged everything up. Everything started breaking. 

互联网的工作方式是路由器交换的讯息从根本上来说,是关于它们如何将信息发送到指定的位置,因为一张坏卡,这个处理器认为它实际上可以在负时间内将信息送到某地方。换句话说,它声称它可以在接收一条信息之前就发送。因此,显然,最快的接收任何地方信息的方式就是将信息发给这个处理器,他会及时地送回并且超早地送达,因此互联网上的每条信息开始通过这个节点交换, 理所当然的会堵塞。一切开始中断。


The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off. Now, of course you couldn't do that today. I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world.

尽管如此,有趣的是,系统管理员可以解决这个问题,但是基本上他们必须关掉所有的互联网。当然现在不可能这样做。我的意思是,关掉一切,有点像整个世界你只接得到有线电视公司打给你的服务电话。


Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today. One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now, and so in fact we're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things, like when you take off from LAX, you're really not thinking you're using the Internet. 

现在,事实上,由于一些原因,他们不能做到这一点。其中一个原因是他们的电话采用IP协议,并且使用像Skype之类的通过互联网通讯的工具,事实上,我们越来越依赖于它,去做越来越多不同的事情,比如,当你当你从洛杉矶起飞,你不会认为你在使用互联网。


When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet. What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet. Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on. 

当你加气时,你也不会认为你在使用互联网。但是,渐渐发生的却是这些系统开始逐渐使用互联网。大部分还不是基于互联网,但是他们开始使用互联网类提供服务功能,和行政功能,因此如果你需要类似于电话系统的东西,它现在大部分仍然相对的独立于互联网,互联网势力正在开始以一些控制和行政功能的方式侵入电话系统,而且基于同样构建的网络手机系统显得是那么的诱人,因为他们运作良好、廉价,他们可以重复,等等。


So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology. And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other. That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that.

因此我们的系统,越来越多地, 开始使用相同的技术 并且开始依赖于这种技术。 因此即使是现代装备火箭的船舰 如今也事实上使用互联网协议 与其他的舰船联系。 这太疯狂了。互联网最初的设计宗旨肯定不是这个。


So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for. And in fact, nobody really exactly understands all the things it's being used for right now. 

所以我们建造了这个系统,我们虽然了解这个系统的所有部分,但是我们以一种不同于预期的非常不同的方式在使用它,而它的规模也与设计大相径庭。事实上,没有人真正完全了解所有这些如今使用的东西。


It's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have. And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that. 

它正在成为像财政系统这么大的一个应急系统,在这个应急系统中我们已经设计好所有部分,但没有人真正了解它的运作方式,它的所有细节,以及它能有怎样的应急行为。所以,如果你听到一个专家谈论互联网,提起它能做这个,它这样做或者它将会做什么,你应该持怀疑态度,就像你怀疑一个经济学家对经济的评论怀疑一个气象员的天气播报,等类似的行为一样。


They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on. So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess. Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago. It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring.

虽然这些专家们见多识广,但是互联网发展得如此迅速,以至于专家们也不能确切地知道将会发生了什么事。所以如果你看到一些互联网宏图,它们只是某人的猜测而已。没人真正知道互联网如今是什么,因为它每个小时都不一样,它在不断的在变化,不断的在重新配置。


And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate. And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on.

而问题在于, 我认为,我们正在将我们自己置于类似于金融风暴那样的灾难之上, 在金融系统中我们采用了一个基于信任建立的系统,该系统只是一个小规模的系统,我们已经扩展了该系统,且超出了该系统运作的极限。因此,我认为,我们不知道互联网收到一个有效的拒绝服务攻击的后果将会如何,而无论如何变化,它将会变得更糟,再过一年会更加糟糕,年复一年,越来越糟。


But so what we need is a plan B. There is no plan B right now. There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. So what we need is something that doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet, or the hospitals have to order fuel oil. 

于是就是我们需要一个B计划,但是目前没有B计划。不存在一个我们谨慎的让它独立于互联网之外的明确的备份系统,该系统是由完全不同的构件所建立。因此我们需要的系统并不一定必须有因特网的功能,但是,即使在没有互联网的情况下,警察部门必须能够呼叫消防部门,或者医院可以订购燃油。


This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project. It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure. It's basically a matter of deciding to do it.

这不是那种花费数十亿美金的政府项目。从技术上讲,这个项目非常简单,因为他可以利用地下已有的无线基础架构- 光纤。这不过是个简单的决定。


But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now. So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well.

但是直到人民意识到真正的需要,才会决定去做,这就是现在的问题所在。因此大量的人,大量的专家们多年来一直在静静地争论我们应该有这么一套独立的系统,但很难让人们在互联网运行良好时,去关注B计划。


So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, "Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system," then it will get built. It's not that hard a problem. It could definitely be done by people in this room.

因此我认为,如果人们认识到 我们逐渐有多么地依赖互联网, 互联网是多么的脆弱, 我们能够着眼于希望这样的系统存在,并且我认为,如果足够多的人说:”是的,我想使用它,我愿意有这样一个系统”,它就会得以建立。这不是一个难题, 甚至可以由在座的某位完成。


And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference, this is probably one of the very easiest to fix. So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it.

因此我认为,实际上,在会议上将会听到的所有问题,极有可能存在一种非常容易的解决方案。我很高兴有机会告诉你们这一点。


Thank you very much.(Applause)

非常感谢。(掌声)


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