Akamai Tool

[Arnaude Kubiak]

AkamaiTechnologies, Inc. is an American delivery company that provides content delivery network[3] (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services.[4][5] Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it operates a worldwide network of servers whose capacity it rents to customers running websites and other web services.

The company was named after akamai, which means 'clever,' or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian. Co-founder Daniel M. Lewin found the term in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after a colleague's suggestion.[6]

Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research on consistent hashing,[7] and was selected as one of the finalists.[8] By August 1998, they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan, they took steps to incorporate the company.[9] Akamai Technologies was incorporated on August 20, 1998.[10]

On September 11, 2001, co-founder Daniel M. Lewin died in the September 11 attacks at the age of 31 when he was stabbed by one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center. He was seated closest to the hijackers and may have tried to stop them.[16]

In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai, taking over from Conrades. Sagan worked to differentiate Akamai from its competitors by expanding its breadth of services.[13] Under his leadership, it grew to $1.37 billion in revenue.[17]

On February 9, 2021, Akamai announced it would reorganize into two internal groups, Security Technology and Edge Technology. It also re-established the role of chief technology officer, and named Robert Blumofe to that role.[20] Long-time chief security officer (CSO) Andy Ellis announced he would leave in March 2021.[21]

Akamai's headquarters are in Kendall Square. It started in Technology Square and later expanded to multiple buildings in Cambridge Center. It consolidated its offices in a purpose-built building at 145 Broadway in December 2019.[22]

The Akamai Intelligent Platform[23] is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide, a network of over approximately 365,000 servers in more than 135 countries.[24] These servers reside on roughly 1,350 of the world's networks, gathering real-time information about traffic, congestion, and trouble spots.[24] Each Akamai server is equipped with proprietary software that uses complex algorithms to process requests from nearby users.[23]

The content delivery process begins with a user submitting a request to a browser. When a user enters a URL, a DNS request is triggered to Akamai's authoritative DNS[25] and an IP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then directly contact the Akamai edge server for subsequent requests.[26] In a content delivery network (CDN) structure, the domain name of the URL is translated by the mapping system[27] into the IP address of an edge server to serve the content to the user.[23]

Akamai delivers web content over its Intelligent Platform by transparently mirroring elements such as HTML, CSS, software downloads, and media objects from customers' servers. The Akamai server is automatically chosen depending on the type of content and the user's network location. The servers are located in more than 200 countries and territories.[28] Receiving content from a server nearer to the user allows for faster downloads and less vulnerability to network congestion. Akamai claims to provide better scalability by delivering the content over the last mile from servers close to end-users, avoiding the middle-mile bottleneck of the Internet.[29] The Download Delivery product line includes HTTP downloads for large downloadable objects, a customizable application for consumers, and analytics tools with metrics that monitor and report on the download process.[30]

Akamai's Network Operations Command Center (NOCC) proactively monitors and troubleshoots all servers in the global Akamai network[33] and generates real-time statistics, providing a view of Internet traffic conditions on Akamai's servers and customers' websites.[citation needed]

Akamai releases The State of the Internet, a quarterly a report based on data gathered from its Intelligent Platform, with statistics including connection speeds, broadband adoption, attack traffic, network connectivity, and mobile connectivity.[34][35]

Akamai's data visualization tools display how data is moving across the Internet in real-time, including global web conditions, malicious attack traffic, and Internet connectivity.[36] Their net-usage indices also monitor global news consumption, industry-specific traffic, and mobile trends.[37] Akamai also offers the Internet Visualization application, allowing users to see real-time data on their mobile devices.[38]

On October 9, 2013, Akamai announced its Open Initiative at the 2013 Akamai Edge Conference. OPEN allows customers and partners to develop and customize how they interact with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Its key components include system and development operations integration, real-time big data integration, and a single-point user interface.[39]

In January 2021, Akamai partnered with Plume, combining the Akamai Security and Personalization Services (SPS) mobile security suite and real-time threat intelligence with Plume's Consumer Experience Management (CEM) Platform.[40]

On July 21, 1999, at Macworld Expo New York, Apple and Akamai announced a strategic partnership to build Apple's new media network, QuickTime TV (QTV), based on QuickTime Streaming Server.[43] Both companies later announced that Apple had made a $12.5 million investment in the company the previous month.[44] Apple continues to use Akamai as their primary CDN[45] for a wide range of applications, including software downloads from Apple's Website, QuickTime movie trailers, and the iTunes Store.[46]

In September 1999, Microsoft and Akamai formed a strategic relationship to incorporate Windows Media technology in Akamai's FreeFlow service, and to facilitate the porting of the FreeFlow product to the Windows platform; this relationship exists to this day.[47] Microsoft Azure offers Akamai (along with Verizon) as options for its "standard" CDN service.[48]

Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was an Akamai customer from March 28, 2003 to April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship,[49] which the network's English-language managing editor claimed was due to "political pressure".[50]

The entire China Central Television website, including its streaming video, has been hosted on Akamai's edge servers since late 2009.[52][53] Hulu uses Akamai for hosting video.[54] MIT OpenCourseWare utilizes Akamai's EdgeSuite for its CDN.[55]

Akamai's other customers include Adobe Systems, Airbnb, AMD, AutoTrader.com, COS, ESPN, The Great Courses, Hewlett-Packard, Hilton Worldwide, IBM, J. C. Penney, Jehovah's Witnesses, MTV Networks, NASA, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, NBC Sports, Pearson Education, Red Bull GmbH, Red Hat, Sony PlayStation and Yahoo!.[57]

One of Akamai's patents covers delivering electronic data using a CDN. Internet Web site proprietors (content providers) contract with Akamai to deliver their sites' content to individual Internet users. The patented method permits large files, such as video and music files, to be accessed more quickly.[non-primary source needed]

The case reached the Supreme Court, which returned it to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; however, with an invitation to re-evaluate its rule, if it chose to do so, that all the steps of a method had to be performed by a single actor for there to be infringement. On remand, the Federal Circuit considered the matter en banc (all active circuit judges) and modified its rule. It now held that a patent could also be directly infringed upon if "an alleged infringer conditions participation in an activity or receipt of a benefit upon performance of a step or steps of a patented method and establishes the manner or timing of that performance". On that basis, the Federal Circuit reinstated the $40 million jury verdict, saying that "Akamai presented substantial evidence demonstrating that Limelight conditions its customers' use of its CDN upon its customers' performance of" the steps that Limelight does not itself perform. It was considered a substantial change in patent law.[citation needed]

In 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former executive at Akamai Technologies for illegally tipping non-public information about the company's financial predicament as part of the insider trading scheme operated by now-imprisoned Galleon Management hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam.[102]

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have reportedly used Facebook's Akamai CDN to collect information on Facebook users.[103] This report appears to show intelligence analysts intercepting communications between Facebook and its CDN provider, but does not indicate Akamai as being complicit in this process.

According to researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and California-Berkeley, University College London, and International Computer Science Institute-Berkeley, Akamai has been blocking access to web sites for visitors using Tor.[104][105] This feature, known as 'network lists,' is optional for and implemented by customers of Akamai, and is a feature common to many major IT vendors that provide network security feeds, such as Emerging Threats, which provides such a feed for free.[105]

Change Log:Update (1/18/21): Updated UA Code. Update (10/23/20): CORS fixes to avoid Chrome blocking requests, removed requests for permissions not used by the extension to avoid violating the Chrome store policiesUpdate (03/15/19): - Adding support for different kinds of subdomains within fetch logs function - Removed "x-extracted-values" from debug headers due to breakage of large group of websites from having bloated response headers - Added support for Brotli pragma header - edited tweet button to point to the most current link for this chrome extensionUpdate (02/02/19): Adding updates from Piez for Akamai Video ManagerUpdate (01/22/19): Removing Proxy from manifest permission listUpdate (10/08/18): Removing JS obfuscation from the extension to be compliant with chrome's latest announcement: -chrome-extensions-by-default.html Update (10/02/18): Fixing invalid timestamp issueUpdate (09/18/18) : Adding support for multiple header name and value pairsUpdate (09/14/18) : Adding support for PUT requestsUpdate (09/09/18) : Revamping Akamai developer toolkit to include the ability to test OPEN APIs with ease.This is an unofficial Akamai extension and there will be no Akamai Technical Support provided in case the tool fails or throws errors, that being said please report all issues using the feedback button within the extension. All API tokens and credentials are stored locally in your laptop and not beamed up to the internet, we run EdgeGrid within the extension and pass the computed Authorization headers with the API.This extension is not supported by Akamai

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