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so apparently if you click on this guy’s instagram story your phone stops working but that’s obviously not true oh oh shh this has been the reaction of tens of thousands of people over the last week after their smartphone crashed because of an instagram story and the internet is going crazy about it there are articles news stories people have made guides on how to get around it and twitter is full of people who have either just fallen victim to it people who don’t believe it and are about to fall victim to it or people planning out long-term strategies to get victims to fall for it but some friends and i decided to make this our life’s mission and we figured out what who how and why and we’ve kind of managed to recreate it here is the top level summary there is an account called pg talal he has two main instagram stories on his page and if you click them you will have a wildly different experience depending on what kind of device you’re on on android phones you’ll see a plain purple screen with confetti and you’ll hear this song called your love which at this stage is now permanently burned into my brain and also you’ll notice that weirdly unlike other instagram stories for some reason on these you can’t pause them by holding your finger down on them it’s almost like this person is taking control over your phone but then if you click the same instagram story on an iphone oh there you will see a grey screen with what looks like arabic text and your phone will become completely unresponsive i had so many questions like how can an instagram story have this much power why does it look like two different things depending on what phone you’re using and what is he trying to do here this doesn’t feel like just harmless fun is he hacking people is he stealing people’s details is he trying to take down instagram we had to find out now you might remember the video i made about that wallpaper that crashed people’s phones if they applied it and in that video i came to the conclusion that it was an accident someone had taken a photo and accidentally edited it in a way that causes phones to die but is it just me or does this one feel like it’s on purpose i mean look at his profile this talal guy isn’t trying to hide these stories if anything he’s proudly inviting people to click them he’s posted updates about how many views the stories have gotten like it’s some sort of trophy he’s created new crashes since those two original ones which i’ll get to plus if anyone can pull something like this off it’s a full stack developer which this guy’s claiming to be aka someone who can build both the front end and the back end of a piece of software aka someone who knows what they’re doing i’m not criticizing i mean he’s created this thing people are fascinated by it it makes total sense for him to try and grow from it he’s actually become one of the fastest growing new accounts on instagram with his one and only main feed post hitting two million views before he deleted it but the point is this crash ain’t no accident so to try and figure out what on earth was going on here i had to look at all the information available there was not a lot talal has no profile picture most of the text is in arabic the one post he did have was a weird compilation of monika from friends also with an arabic caption and the only personal things i could find about him were his personal account which is private and his tick tock account which is literally just him focusing back and forth on the letter n like i said not a lot to work with but i thought okay the one thing that i can do right off the bat is to use google lens to translate all of this arabic text turns out the caption on his post just redirects people to his personal account and the captions on the stories that are crashing phones just translate to nice thing i passed and bittersweet thing which wasn’t quite as enlightening as i’d hoped but then i had an idea i thought the next best thing if i can’t find any data was to create the data so with a heavy heart i took out one phone after the next installed instagram on them visited these stories and monitored in both horror and fascination what was happening to each it felt like sending my babies off to torture but i did learn something interesting the general consensus online has been if you have an iphone steer clear but if you have an android you’re good that’s not true because yes if i view this story on a super modern samsung galaxy s21 ultra with 16 gigs of ram and the latest version of android it is fine if i try to view it on that doesn’t have instagram stories get that but if i try viewing it on a mid-range nokia phone from a few years ago it’s definitely struggling with something not the only thing nokia’s been struggling with recently and if i then just try it on a really cheap old android phone it will crash and it will crash badly when i tried it it wouldn’t even open the instagram story and from the moment i clicked it the phone couldn’t do anything none of the buttons worked the screen didn’t work i got a pop-up saying the whole system is unresponsive but i couldn’t act on it because the system was unresponsive this video i swear has been borderline traumatic to make but if you are enjoying it then a sub to the channel would be therapeutic so we’ve got three groups of android phones here the most powerful ones are fine the middle ones struggle but make it through eventually and the weak ones die so at this point i thought oh of course the reason phones are crashing is that he’s done something to this story that means it requires a lot of processing power or ram to run i never want to hear this song again stop and that would also kind of explain why pretty much all iphones are crashing because even the highest end iphones right now are capped at six gigabytes of ram i knew i was on the right track but i wasn’t quite there yet so i did what any brave soldier would do yeah i asked other people i basically assembled the tech avengers i reached out to ios developers xda developers java and flutter developers android experts like gary explains and my number one go-to on this was annanet who’s a cyber security researcher at arizona state university and we have some answers okay so the best way to understand why an instagram story is causing phones to crash is to understand what is in that instagram story and as it turns out it’s a bit more than just those arabic characters you can see so what aninae was showing me is that if you go onto instagram via the web and you delve into the inspect tab you can see all of the raw data behind every post and every story on any profile i feel like that’s a full video there just on the amount of data being collected but the surprising thing for the purposes of this video is what we found when we inspected pg talal’s instagram stories so you might know that instagram has these stickers that you can add like a poll or a question or a countdown they’re like little widgets that anyone looking at these stories can interact with and on their own this isn’t going to be putting any major strain on your device but using inspect we can see that what pg tile has done is created two of these elements at the same time one of them is a countdown that was built to end on 23rd of october 2020 and one of them is a quiz which just has the question r and three possible answers as d d and c the contents of these elements isn’t what’s important i’m pretty sure he just typed in random letters because he knew that you weren’t going to see them anyways and the reason for that is that he has managed to make them enormous so for context if i inspect a normal instagram story i’ll find that the x and y scale values for the size of each sticker element will be somewhere between zero and one and it roughly means what proportion of the screen will that thing be taking up for pg talal stories though the scale of these elements has 18 digits so we’re not talking about stickers big enough to fill up a single phone’s display not even hundreds not even thousands of phones we’re talking stickers so big that they can span quadrillions and possibly quintillions of phones or in other words he has made this quiz and this countdown time is so large that if we were to actually zoom out and see the whole image it would be many many times the size of the earth do you want to know why the image looks purple on android well that’s because what you’re actually seeing is just part of the countdown timer it’s stretched out to enormous proportions so you’re literally looking at a tiny tiny part of this section here and the confetti is just what instagram shows when a countdown has ended and this also explains why you can’t pause it because i’m not really clicking on the story here i’m just clicking on a non-interactive part of the countdown timer but how because if i just open instagram i can’t just keep expanding these elements indefinitely instagram’s thought about this well pj talal has used something called an http proxy which is a type of software that allows him to see but more importantly modify the data that’s coming out of his phone before it hits the instagram servers think of it like a like a middleman talal makes a quick instagram story with a normal looking quiz and countdown timer on his phone but then instead of sending that story directly to instagram and it going public he has intercepted it using this proxy where he has then changed those size and the location values too of these elements to something astronomical and so what we think is happening here is that because the instagram isn’t built with this scale of numbers in mind it isn’t dealing with them properly instagram should have realized that these numbers are stupidly large and filtered them out they should have had some sort of rule that says if size is greater than one then make it just one but actually they’ve gone and sent these garbage values straight to your smartphone and so whether or not your device crashes from the story depends on how well it is able to deal with these numbers as an overall piece of software android is that’s why you can still see some part of this countdown timer so because there isn’t an error it’s not like all android phones are just going to start crashing immediately but it is just still generally strenuous to try and render out something this massive hence why older less powerful android phones still struggle but ios as a whole just isn’t ready to receive numbers of this magnitude it doesn’t know how to display these objects and that’s why every iphone regardless of how powerful they are crashes this is why you don’t see any purple you don’t see any confetti and instead you just see the original grey video with the arabic caption that’s when android phones are still there but it’s sitting behind this purple countdown timer so the crash is somewhat to do with power and ram like i initially assumed but it’s also to do with software and it’s mostly instagram’s fault but why why did talal do this well my best guess is that it’s a for a bit of fun a bit of a challenge but also be to flag a problem facebook who owns instagram they have a whole list of coders who they’ve actually paid money to because they’ve managed to find vulnerabilities and then reported them i don’t think this person is trying to break anyone’s phone because well first of all every phone of mine that’s crashed because of it i have managed to recover and secondly plot twist yesterday the guy himself actually replied to me from his personal account and apparently he’s only 14 years old he is a self-taught developer who started at the age of 11. and i just think it’s hilarious that he’s managed to get through all of instagram security and i also think he might have just hacked the instagram chat because i swear you are welcome is not a react option [Music] okay with all that out of the way there was one thing left to do we now know that it is possible to crash someone’s phone through an instagram story we think we know how it’s done can we recreate it yes and no we did manage to use an http proxy to intercept the story we did manage to scale up these stickers to ridiculous dimensions just like talal did like here you can see that we have made a story that just like his looks purple on android but you can’t see that purple on ios because the iphone can’t render the countdown but it does look like instagram has fixed the crashing itself because both phones survive talal’s stories will still crash your phone but it doesn’t look like you can make a new one now that does the same thing however there will always be another exploit this talal guy just a couple of days ago posted a new story that used a completely different trick a sequence of characters that your phone just doesn’t understand to crash instagram this one isn’t as serious it doesn’t crash the whole phone but it’s still kind of crazy to see you literally cannot open the story because the second you try boom the app closes and this crash annan and i were able to recreate annaney built a story literally 20 minutes later using the same technique and sure enough instagram quits the takeaway of all of this is that no software is ever going to be completely watertight because there’s always going to be an exception that the company didn’t plan for and it leads to some fascinating questions like what if someone created a bug and then paid for adverts so that that bug was shared on every single person’s device could they hold instagram to ransom anyways do consider subscribing if you enjoyed thanks again to annanei for his help on this and if you do want to see my last video about crazy inventions that’s up here and if you want to see the wallpaper that could kill people’s phones that’s over here my name is aaron this is
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