Decoding YouTube's error 500 page

Question

This is YouTube\'s 500 page. Can anyone help decode this information?

500 Internal Server Error


Sorry, something went wrong.
A te         


        

Answer 1

It's entirely possible that this is random padding to avoid the "friendly" IE error pages that show if your error page does not contain more than 512 bytes of HTML. It would be base64 encoded if it were simply random bytes.

Answer 2

It looks like you are not the only one who is looking for some secret messages in YouTube error page. It seems that you can decode it using Base64.

Here is how:

http://www.cambus.net/decoding-youtube-http-error-500-message/

In a nutshell:

Sadly, contrary to my expectations, there doesn't seem to be any hidden message… Screw you, highly trained monkeys!

I guess it is just another Easter Egg similar to 'Goats Teleported' performance counter Google Chrome had:

https://plus.google.com/+RobertPitt/posts/PrqAX3kVapn

But I guess unless you look like this, you can't be 100% sure.

Answer 3

Imho this is all about customer care.

Actually there would be no need to send the error/debug message to the customer, because, I guess, it's already handled internally.

So:

• why do we see this?
• and why do they crypt it?
• and is there really no hidden message for us?

Although the error might be handled and resolved internally, this does not necessarily satisfy a customer, who is not able to use the product. They pretty much do crypt by a good reason as this debug message might reveal more than a typical admin is used to. And also there is no need to hide a message for us. Why? Because we NEVER stop until we find something.

I think:

• internally the error is dealt with
• external users might have something in hand to tell a technician if necessary and in return can get an approximation of ongoing problem

All in all nothing special about it and i think linking e.g. to the inf. monkey theorem is a bit overspectulated...

Answer 4

The debug information contained in the (urlsafe-)base64 blob is likely encrypted.

Think about it from Google's perspective: You would want to display a stack trace, relevant headers of the http request and possibly some internal state of the user session to help a developer debug the situation. On the other hand all that information might contain sensitive information that you don't want the general public to see or that might endanger the user if he copy'n pastes it in a public support forum.

If I was to take a guess of the format I would imagine:

• A public identifier of the key used for encryption (their servers could use different keys then)
• The debug data encrypted using an authenticated encryption scheme
• Additional data for error correction when OCR has to be used

For statistical analysis of the format it would be interesting to sample a lot of these error messages and see if some parts of the message are less random than you would expect from encrypted data (symmetrical encrypted data should follow a uniform distribution).

Answer 5

Error 500 means google has a problem which can not resolve. So when reporting a bug the most important thing is to prepare reproduction steps. So I tried to find an answer of the question "When this happens?"

I found this post in reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/40k858/is_youtube_giving_you_500_internal_server_errors/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=comment_list

As resume:

• It happens on desktops (www...), it works ok on mobile version (m...)

• It happens for authenticated users. For anonymous users is working fine.

• The problem is resolved after cookies are cleaned.

So I would give a direction: try to find the key in the session cookie. I hope my 2 cents will help.