互聯網:電纜和鋼鐵組成的心臟如何運行

Books and Artts; Book review;How the internet works

Contrary to expectations, the internet has a heart of cable and steel

和預期不一樣，互聯網有一顆由電纜和鋼鐵組成的“心臟”

"Goverments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind." So begins John Perry Barlow, once a lyricist for the GratefulDead and now a cyber-libertarian, in a tract he penned in 1996, entitled, "A Declaration of theIndependence of Cyberspace". It is a poetic summation of the common image of the internet as an ethereal, non-physical thing—an immanent Cloud that is at once everywhere and for ever on the far side of a screen.

此書開篇引用了約翰·佩裏·巴洛於1996年寫的一篇文章中的一段話：“工業世界的統治者們，你們是由實體和鋼鐵組成的乏味巨物，而我來自思想的新家園——網絡空間。”他曾是死之華樂隊的作詞人，而今則是一位網絡自由主義者。他還稱此書爲“網絡空間的獨立宣言”。這是對互聯網的普遍印象飽含詩意的總結：飄逸、虛無的東西——如一朵浮雲，可以即刻無處不在，而又永遠在電腦屏幕遙遠的另一端。

For Andrew Blum, a writer for Wired, that illusion was shattered on the day a squirrelchewed through the wire connecting his house to the internet. That rude reminder of the net's physicality sparked an interest in the infrastructure that makes the internet possible—the globe-spanning tangle of wires, cables, routers and data centres that most users take entirely for granted. His book is an engaging reminder that, cyber-Utopianism aside, the internet is as much a thing of flesh and steel as any industrial-age lumber mill or factory.

對於《連線》雜誌撰稿人安德魯·布朗姆而言，在一隻松鼠咬斷他的網線的那天，這種幻想已被打破。這個對網絡實體“無禮”的提醒激起了他對互聯網基礎設施的興趣，因爲這些滿世界繞在一起的電線、電纜、路由器和數據中心使得互聯網成爲可能，而大多數用戶認爲這些完全是理所當然。他的書是一個引人入勝的提醒：拋開網絡烏托邦主義不談，互聯網和任何工業時代的伐木場或工廠一樣，都是由實體和鋼鐵組成的。

It is also an excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works. The term “internet” is a collective noun for thousands of smaller networks, run by corporations, governments, universities and private business, all stitched together to form one (mostly) seamless, global, “internetworked” whole. In theory, the internet is meant to be widely distributed and heavily resilient, with many possible routes between any two destinations. In practice, acombination of economics and geography means that much of its infrastructure is concentratedin a comparatively small number of places.

該書也是對互聯網所有基本要素如何運作的一次精彩介紹。術語“互聯網”是一個集合名詞，包括數以千計由公司、政府、大學和私營企業運作的子網絡，所有這些交織在一起形成一個(基本上)無縫對接、全球互聯運作的網絡整體。理論上說，互聯網應該是分佈廣、承載量大、包含任意兩點之間許多可能的路徑。實際上，說它是經濟學和地理學的結合，其意爲它將衆多的基礎設施集中於相對少數的空間內。

So when Mr Blum travels to the tiny Cornish village of Porthcurno, he is able to see the landing stations for many of the great transatlantic fibre-optic cables that carry traffic—in the form of beams of pulsating laser light—between Europe and the Americas. A couple of hundred miles up the road is the London Internet Exchange, a building in which individual networks can connect to each other and to the wider internet. London's exchange is the world's third-busiest, behind the ones in Frankfurt and Amsterdam. What happens in such places can affect millions of people: one veteran network engineer in an American exchange recalls “shut[ting] off Australia” when one of that country's big networks was tardy with its bills.

所以當布朗姆先生來到波斯科諾的小村康沃爾時，他看到了基站——站內許多橫跨大西洋的粗大光纖電纜內部迅速地閃動着一道道激光，並以這種形式在歐洲和美洲之間傳遞信息。沿着道路方向的幾百英里外就是倫敦網絡交換中心，通過它，單個的局域網可以相互連通，也可以連接到廣域的互聯網;論繁忙程度，它只排在法蘭克福和阿姆斯特丹之後。這裏的所發生的一切可以影響上百萬人：一位曾在美國交換中心工作資深的網絡工程師回憶到，在澳大利亞的巨大局域網中，曾有某個局域網拖欠費用，該中心就發出了 “切斷澳大利亞的網路”的指令。

Network engineering is not a glamorous profession, and the physical structures of the greatest network ever built lack the grandeur of a hydroelectric dam or a continent-spanning railway. But they do have their own style: featureless, virtually deserted buildings, full of marching rows of high-tech servers and routers fed by thick bundles of cable, their cooling fans forming a roaring chorus in the chilly gloom. That style is modulated by the local culture of wherever the building happens to be. Thus one American firm goes for a super high-tech, “cyberrific” look in an attempt to impress clients. Frankfurt's internet exchange is a model of cool rationality, whereas London's is grotty and coming apart at the seams.

網絡工程並非一個光鮮的行業，而且最爲龐大網絡的實物構造缺乏水電大壩的宏偉壯觀，也沒有洲際鐵路的綿延大氣。但它確實有自己的特點：普普通通、幾乎廢棄的大樓裏，整齊地排滿了富含高科技的服務器和路由器，由厚厚的幾捆電纜連接起來，它們的散熱風扇在冷清昏暗中組成了一支正在高歌的合唱隊。無論大樓在哪，這種特點都會受到本地文化的影響。因此，一個追求超高科技風格的美國公司，打造“網絡交通”的外觀是給客戶留下深刻印象的一種嘗試途徑。法蘭克福網絡交換中心就是良好理性的一個模板，而倫敦的則是髒亂帶着些破裂。

And then there are the engineers themselves, a rootless but engaging brotherhood that travels the world from rack to rack, helping to keep the electronic show on the road, and whose interactions and dealmaking does a lot to shape the geography of the electronic spider's web that now engulfs the planet.

還有工程師他們自身是一個較爲鬆散但相處融洽的組織，馬不停蹄地在世界各地旅行，奔波於電子產品展覽會，他們的交際和生意圈如一張電子蜘蛛網正在包圍整個世界。

Mr Blum's book is an excellent guide for anyone interested in how the global modern electronic infrastructure works. And it is a timely antidote to oft-repeated abstractions about “cyberspace” or “cloud computing”. Such terms gloss over the fact that, just like the pipes that carry water, the tubes that carry bits are reliant on old-fashioned, low-tech spadework, humancontact and the geographical reality in which all that exists.

對“世界上的現代電子設施是如何運作的”這一問題有興趣的任何人，可以通過布朗姆先生這本書得到良好的入門指引。該書也是對被熱議的“網絡空間”或“雲計算”這類抽象概念的及時說明。這些術語掩蓋了一個事實：正如水管輸送自來水，網路傳遞着信息。它有賴於老式、低技術含量的基礎工作，人們的交往;這些都存在於現實的地理狀況之中。