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Internet is Not in Clouds, It's in Oceans - Learn it Internet Works

1,268 views Wait, is this logic right? • May 05, 2023
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Slog Reference: How the internet works?

Description

What is internet and how does the internet work? A lot of us have misconceptions about how the internet actually works. We think of the internet as some magical concept that is hard to comprehend for a normal person. But it's actually quite easy, and we're going to see how exactly it works in this video.

Let's see how underwater wires connected across the seas carry the data required for your Google search and cat videos and how sharks hinder the working of the internet.

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Watch other episodes:
India’s overpopulation: https://youtu.be/Sjur6Bu30YM
India’s wealth distribution: https://youtu.be/z4Qf44Ti338
What is MLM: https://youtu.be/tX8r0KQiQEg
Epic science breakthroughs: https://youtu.be/m2ul_1KYXpA

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:12 How internet works?
07:30 Repairing cables
08:50 Security & privacy
14:00 Why should you worry?
16:07 Data safety
18:13 Conclusion

#futureiq #internet

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How the internet works?

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Transcript

do you know how the internet works hi switch on the router and then open the browser and type no actually no as in most people are not aware of the billions of dollars worth of hardware and software that is involved in just me sending a WhatsApp message from here to your phone here yeah and uh you know how all the complexity that is involved there and how sharks are involved in all of this sharks yeah and um the internet is so important to our life right your life would really collapse without the internet and yet you don't have an idea of how it works I don't think that's a good situation right sharks yes we'll come to that buddy
sorry so when I send a WhatsApp message to you and it goes from here to here do you roughly know the path it traces kind of I mean I am assuming that there is a server maintained by WhatsApp which gets the message where is that server somewhere in the United States most likely right so when I send a message from here it goes all the way to let's say San Francisco let's assume that's where the server is okay and then from San Francisco it comes all the way back here right yes so let's start with the big question first right how does a message go from India to San Francisco that's actually a very good question
I've never really thought of that How does it go from India to San Francisco most people think I have asked this question to many people and most of them think that it goes via satellite right in fact that's the kind of picture they show in textbooks that there is the signal going up up like this to the satellite the signal going down down like this and it ends up in San Francisco Naveen is in full teacher mode I love this you are going to love this as well answer is no okay most of the time no there are some Communications happening through satellite okay but the bandwidth is just not there okay okay uh until recently satellites could take
maybe you know megabytes of data uh Elon Musk and starlink has brought it up two gigabytes of data what is needed today is terabytes of data or more any guess as to how that happens I actually have no idea but I'm guessing it's not satellites it is definitely not settled lights it is cables just physically going from India to the US cables like wires why is this this thick one inch thick right it's not wires it is fiber optic and all of that but it's going physically from here to the US okay from here to the US yes I don't see any wires coming out of my phone or your phone or any of these devices so I mean
you know from here till a rectal's office which is probably like around the corner there right or jio or Vodafone we don't want any lawsuits from any of them it could be any internet service provider yeah disclaimer so for this phone huh is talking wirelessly to the cell tower you are aware of cell tower yes right yes from the cell tower there's a physical wire that's going to uh jio's office okay from Puna there is a physical wire probably going somewhere to Bombay okay now from Bombay huh where do you think it goes how I from Bombay it has to somehow reach San Francisco is what I know correct in Bombay the wire has reached so far so
there must be more wires going from Bombay to San Francisco how somehow yeah it must cross the ocean underground cables underground so in fact I have this image here which is showing an this is what an undersea cable looks like right it's sitting there on the river bed wow so from Bombay to somewhere in Africa there is one cable going then it crosses Overland to the other side of Africa and then again it crosses the Atlantic under on the ocean bed okay it looks like this looks like the Rope game that we used to play where we used to put threads all over the house and make it you know go over sofas and chairs and
take a look here take a look here the red this is the underseakable map of the world oh so pretty the red lines across the ocean are the actual undersea cables and the red dots are the cities where those cables start and end oh I see one in Bombay and one on the eastern coast somewhere in I don't know Chennai right so you can see I mean it probably if you are going from Chennai it will go down here to the Cape of Good Hope somewhere there and then cross like this and then cross like this and that's how it is interesting um you know that the ocean is deep very right so how does this actually get to
the bottom of the ocean that's another fascinating story okay so there are ships called cable layer ships okay which have this huge amounts of cable okay now this cable although it is just an inch thick huh it is heavy huh of course like a kilometer of cable is like one point something tons right and of course you are going to have to uh lay thousands of kilometers or cable so we are talking about thousands of tons which is in the ship so if you are imagining somebody like an Arnold Schwarzenegger carrying all those cables and putting them in the ocean and then lining them that's not what happens you need chips for that not just ships but at the bottom of the
ocean there is something which is like walking along the bottom like a little machine oh and the cable which is all coiled up at the top of the ship is going all the way down and this machine is laying the cable nicely on the ocean floor oh you also have to worry about a few more things so if the ocean floor has a dip like this huh you can't have the cable going across right right because yeah because that might end up stretching the cable because right so it has to be laid like this okay and you have to worry about a whole bunch of things okay you have to worry about the currents which move the cable
and you have to worry about boots which put an anchor and the anchor will drag the cable and cut it off uh as it gets closer to the shore the boat might actually just go and bang into the cable and and you have to worry about sharks which are biting the cable there have been instances of sharks biting cables okay wow and do they get electrocuted no these are fiber optic cables yeah absolutely don't get electrocuted no there's not much electricity in there but by the way when I was imagining a shark going no but when there is a problem okay how do you repair it oh okay so what what are they repairing here so the I mean inside that there is
a cable that this person is actually going to go and repair this is only possible when it is fairly shallow correct you can't dive for uh like 200 100 meters or so yeah in any other situation okay let me see if I can run this okay it's starting here okay right it cuts the cable picks up one and brings it to the surface picks other end brings it to the surface and then joins them with a new cable at the surface and then lace the whole thing down again oh so this is like extending the cable because it is not enough length for it too exactly right so this is how a cable uh actually gets
repaired so that little red thing was the extended cable the additional cable that was added fascinating you know when we think of sending messages via WhatsApp and signal and Telegram and whatnot we never really think of how how much of a journey that message has to travel we just are like send me that message quickly yeah not just that um there are a whole bunch of other things that you have to uh worry about okay so like I said from here the message is going to the cell tower from the tower it is going to some actual office with a bunch of servers from there it is going to another office in Bombay with servers then one office in
Africa and in uh San Francisco correct so then it has to also make that same Journey all the way back right which brings up if I send an email for example okay right it's going to go to all those servers and do you know that if there is an admin sitting there at the server and that admin opens up the databases in that server that admin would be able to read a whole bunch of messages going forward I thought all of that was encrypted and secure and WhatsApp says your chats are secured what is that is not true in fact when WhatsApp says that their end to end secured the reason it has to be end to
end secured is because of things like that right so one is that have you ever used a HTTP website I have and do you know that there is https which is different I do I do know this one I don't know this one so HTTP is your regular internet which used to be the uh basis or the the bare minimum at one point but now we have https the S stands for secure because now all your communication is encrypted any website that you open in your browser is actually encrypted if you have https which means only your browser and the server can read what is being requested and responded to and anybody in the middle if they get the same data the
same binary information they can't read any of it because it will all look guard right exactly so https is extremely important do not use a website which is just HTTP because the servers in the middle people sitting there would be able to actually read your messages back one so especially if you are doing any financial transaction always make sure that it is an https website not an HTTP website the other thing to keep in mind is that if I send you an Instagram message okay fine there is https from here till Instagram's server in the US but on Instagram server the message gets stored and anybody uh system admin sitting there can open up and read your Instagram
messages and there have been instances in the past of Facebook firing people for reading messages illegally okay most companies have this as a potential problem most of the communications that you are using have this as an issue you use Twitter DMS anybody assist admin and Twitter would be able to read those DMS okay well generally anything you put on the internet always assume that there is someone who will be able to read it someday if not today maybe tomorrow maybe day after tomorrow maybe 10 years down the line but assume that anything you put on the internet will eventually be read by someone that you don't want reading well I mean that's a very cynical uh view I don't really believe
in that I'm a very cynical person baby yes so I want to distinguish between like the very cynical view where everything is open safer right don't use https completely random people in like little ISP offices can read your messages correct if you use https then sysadmins in like these big companies like Google and Facebook will be able to use messages right when WhatsApp says that it is end-to-end encrypted signal says it is end-to-end encrypted what it means is that the message gets encrypted before it leaves your phone okay then what gets saved on Facebook's server you know what's Episode by Facebook right yes yeah what gets stored on Facebook server is an encrypted version so even
the sediment there is not able to read that message and that encrypted one gets sent to your phone and it can only be decrypted on your phone that is what end-to-end encrypted means okay so any message that you send via WhatsApp ends up on Facebook servers as a bunch of garbled text because that is what encryption means it takes normal text and creates garbled text out of it which gets stored on Facebook servers then that garble text gets sent to me for example if he's sending the message to me and my phone will decrypt the garble text back into normal text so in in a sense end-to-end encryption is important if you want to have secure Communications and uh
um there are other arguments in this regard also if you want to read more about it we'll put some links in the description for you to understand more of it yeah go on some random sediment sitting in Facebook why should you even worry about them being able to read your messages right who cares well it depends on what I do for a living and it becomes so important if the job that I do for a living is in the interest of National Security but Espionage corporate Espionage there are many no but what about like Facebook adserman he's not going to do a spell Espionage will the Facebook admin can be influenced by somebody with a three
letter organization so those are the kinds of things to worry about one is people in government and sensitive posts end up using things like WhatsApp and Instagram there have been instances of sensitive data leaking through those channels the other thing to worry about is the fact that governments can lean on Facebook and say okay I've forwarded me all the DMS of this one person because whatever yeah right and that's when something like signal which is end to end encrypted uh is good because the company says you know even we don't know what it is we can't give it to you right because they literally can't do anything conversely what is happening is that governments around the world are
armed twisting these companies to say end-to-end encrypted shouldn't be allowed okay so that's something to uh be vigilant about I think this is this is like a bigger discussion and a bigger conversation will which will require some other time yeah which will require a bigger amount of time and a bigger video which we will definitely do one of these days but uh just in case you are interested the uh there are multiple sources on the internet where you can read about the end-to-end encryption used by WhatsApp used by telegram used by signal why they are different how they are different and why you should even worry about all of these things but again that matters if you are in uh in
territories or in areas where sensitive sensitive information is being discussed so now given all of this that you have explained does that mean that none of my data is safe and therefore I should probably never use the internet at all no of course not uh the thing is that the internet is one of the greatest uh inventions ever and has increased the productivity of the world so you can't stay away from it right just have to be a little more careful Security in general is always a trade-off between being more secure and getting things done right so you just have to find the correct point so what I would do is extremely sensitive information do not put on any one of the
internet right so I never put my bank passwords I don't save them in any uh files people who have uh Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency the passwords related to that they don't say that you actually can buy things called Hardware wallets and cold storages and so on where the password gets stored in a place and in a way that is not accessible from the internet so that's uh part one but for any other thing which is less sensitive than that you have to take a judgment call um okay so if it is fully end-to-end encrypted uh then you can use it for sensitivish but not that sensitive uh things when it is not intend to an
encrypt encrypted then you can use it only for a little less sensitive things and so on right in fact we can we have another episode just giving you a guide to how to be safe on the internet that involves a whole bunch of other things including hacking and phishing and what kind of passwords to have and so on yeah do check that episode out but uh here is the Crux of it anything that you absolutely want to take to your grave never put it on the internet if you want to take it to your grave don't put it on the internet if you're okay with it being revealed before you die then sure you can put it on the internet somewhere
where it is enough uh encrypted but uh yeah that was very fascinating and uh it gave a very nice insight into how a simple message going from this phone to that phone the length and breadth of the globe that it travels so thank you so much for that yeah in fact there's a whole bunch of things I didn't cover like how does this phone find out where to send the message how does it know where is that server how does it know what is the path from here to that server all of that is fascinating I think you know you can look up something like DNS and internet routing uh to read upon this we are not going to look any
of that up we are going to make more videos about them and we'll get him to tell us all of that my name is srikanth this is Naveen and this is future IQ thank you