This video was made possible by ExpressVPN. Start browsing the web securely with three months
free by going to expressvpn.com/HAI. This video was also made possible by me,
Sam, a guy who doesn’t have a degree in computer science and is just trying his
best. You can be Sam’s friend for free by commenting below, “Hey Sam, good job on
this. Even if a few details were a bit off, you clearly put in a lot of effort to understand a
complicated topic, and I appreciate you.” Anyways, you know Pakistan? They’re like,
the #1 stan, at least in terms of the size of their goat population, and if you’re a Pakistan
stan, you might know that back in 2008, the Pakistani government got their kameez all in
a bunch about the trailer for an Islamophobic film by a Dutch politician named Geert Wilders:
the rare man whose name is as dumb-sounding as his face is dumb-looking. And so, the Pakistani
government decided to do the censorship about it, and seeing as the trailer was on YouTube, they
took the totally chill, not-at-all-overactive step of blocking all of Pakistan from all of YouTube.
The problem was, Pakistan’s attempt to block people in Pakistan from accessing YouTube ended
up causing YouTube outages for about 2/3 of the world—an area that, and you’ll never believe this,
is significantly larger than Pakistan. Why? How? What? Who? Huh? Don’t worry,
we’re going to explain. So let’s say you need to
get to www.spaghettioseatenoutofbellybuttons.com. Well, first you’ll need to know what IP address
corresponds to that website, and that information will be provided by something called the DNS,
which I’m not going to explain because I already did a whole video about it and the only thing we
like to repeat on this channel are the jokes. But even once you have the IP address,
your computer is here, and the server that hosts that IP address is all the way over here.
How are you gonna get there? Well, your computer is directed to the server it needs via BGP, aka
borderline gate protocol, aka big good program, which is not its name but is easier to remember.
To understand BGP, you have to first understand that the internet is basically a network of
networks. These networks are sometimes called ASes or autonomous systems—an AS might be an ISP,
which is an internet service provider, or a university’s system of computers,
or a government agency’s computer system, or whatever. All of these networks are connected
together, and well, that’s basically the internet. If you think of all these interconnected ASes as
little cities full of IP addresses you can go to, think of BGP as your GPS:
it figures out which route you should take through the ASes—the smaller networks that
make up the internet—to get where you need to go. BGP is able to figure out where to take you
thanks to information that ASes provide, in the form of “prefix announcements,” which is when ASes
inform their peers—the other nearby ASes—what IP addresses they can deliver traffic to. The
AS might actually host that IP address, or it might just be connected to the AS that does.
Either way, the AS is basically out here yelling out “Hey everybody! If you’re looking for
www.spaghettioseatenoutofbellybuttons.com, it’s this way! I can get you there! Follow
me to tomato-flavored, o-shaped, linty-textured bliss!” So, in sum, when you want to go a website,
BGP will analyze all the information it has from all the ASes shouting out where they can take you,
then it’s gonna plan out the fastest route to the website you want, and then it’s going to take you
there, hopping you from AS to AS until you arrive. Now that we’ve got that background,
let’s do like the British Empire and get into Pakistan. So basically, when Pakistan decided
to ban Youtube in 2008, Pakistan Telecom, which is an ISP, an internet service provider,
and an AS, which again is an autonomous system, started shouting out where it could take you,
as ASes do. But, again much like the British Empire, it lied. Pakistan Telecom said that it
was the best route to YouTube, but it was actually taking people to a blank page. Problem was, BGP,
which again is your computer’s GPS, believed Pakistan Telecom: so when people said “take
me to YouTube,” BGP looked at all the information from all the ASes, it saw Pakistan Telecom yelling
“YouTube’s over here” and so it took people there, to that fake YouTube that was really just a blank
page. And it did that for almost everybody, until Pakistan Telecom realized what they had done,
shut it down two hours later, and then slowly backed away while whistling and went, “hey, that
was like totally weird; I wonder who did that?” Now I’m sure you’re wondering, why did computers
trust this fake route over the real YouTube? Well, the main problem had to do with PCCW, the massive
Hong-Kong based ISP that provides internet connection to the smaller Pakistan Telecom.
PCCW forgot to put on their verifying pants that day, and didn’t screen Pakistan Telecom’s prefix
announcement claiming it was YouTube, and so PCCW accepted the route, and started telling the whole
internet “hey guys, check it out, YouTube lives in Islamabad now”—and because PCCW is one of the
20-largest data carriers in the world, everyone believed them, without verifying it. The second
reason the fake page won out over real YouTube has to do with how BGP works: it likes specificity.
Pakistan Telecom said it was the right place for 256 IP addresses in YouTube’s IP address space,
while YouTube was saying it was the right place for 1,024 IP addresses.
BGP believed Pakistan Telecom because it was providing a more specific set of IP addresses, so
it sent most of the world there, where they were greeted not with 2008 YouTube in all its grainy,
non-monetized, Charlie-Bit-My-Finger glory, but with a blank page.
In the end, the overarching problem is that much of the internet still operates based on trust,
and if there’s one thing Ronald Reagan taught me, it’s that you should trust, but verify.
The other thing Ronald Reagan taught me is that the rich should get tax cuts,
so let’s start raising my income bracket by talking about ExpressVPN. Pakistan probably won’t
interrupt you the next time you’re trying to get to YouTube, but there’s still all kinds of people
who might try to watch what you’re doing. If you want to be able to browse in true incognito mode,
you should use ExpressVPN. Without a VPN, your ISP will be able to see every site you go to,
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