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Hi Leo, My Zone Alarm is constantly blocking "a1255.g.akamai". I did a Google on it but didn't find out much. Can you tell me what it is? I had to make an assumption or two, but a few steps lead me to an answer that I think is correct. What I can't explain is why Zone Alarm is blocking it. Let me walk you through what I did. The steps may be useful in researching other domain issues in the future. First off, I have to assume you really mean "a1255.g.akamai.net". Here's why I say that:
So now, armed with a working domain name, I attempted to find out who owns the "second level" domain, "akamai.net". My first attempt is to use a "Whois" service to look up the owner of the domain. I typically start with betterwhois.com, which in this case tells me that the registrar (not the owner) is Tucows.com, and that I need to visit them to get more details. I visit Tucows domain help site which includes their whois look-up. Entering "akamai.net" tells me what I wanted to know: the owner is a company called, not surprisingly, "Akamai Technologies". So that didn't help much, did it? We still don't know what Akamai does. To me that means it's time for Google. Searching on "akamai" returns not only the company home page (akamai.com), but also an interesting Wikipedia article on Akamai. In there we learn that "Akamai Technologies ... provides, among other services, global Internet content caching." And in one of the references cited in that article, "Theory of how Akamai works", we learn that there's actually a structure to the domain name - the "a1255" and the "g" probably mean something specific - though we're not quite sure what. So what's all that mean? What's this "Internet content caching" thing? To grossly oversimplify, it's a form of web hosting that "spreads the load" across other servers. For example, a business might use akamai to host all of it's images, so as to reduce load on their own servers. The akamai servers might optimize for providing images, and only images, very quickly. For busy sites, this type of load balancing, or more correctly, load spreading, allows several computers, servers and infrastructure to cooperate in such a way as to present web pages as quickly as possible. "[Internet content caching is] a form of web hosting
that 'spreads the load' across other servers."
While I'm not as busy as sites that use akamai, I use a similar technique here at Ask Leo! If you download any of my podcasts, while the URL you initially see begins with "http://ask-leo.com/podcasts/...", that's redirected, and the actual download occurs from a completely different server: "http://media.pugetsoundsoftware.com/ask-leo.com/podcasts/...". This actually distributes the bandwidth of the larger MP3 downloads to a completely different server. That "media" server is acting in many ways like the Akamai service we've just discussed. Now... why is Zone Alarm tripping on it? I have no idea. You didn't say whether the block was outgoing or incoming. I can't envision a reason for an incoming connection from an akamai server, so blocking that makes sense. But my assumption is that you're seeing an outgoing block. Since so many companies use Akamai services I'm not sure at all why that might be blocked, unless the specific customer represented by "a1255.g" is something or someone that Zone Alarm has determined may be harmful. I'd be tempted to follow that question through with Zone Alarm. Related:
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My browser has a myriad of cookies for the domain akamai.net. So Akamai may have really good check on what google identities are coupled with what logins on yahoo and other sites.
Posted by: Tobi at June 26, 2006 1:29 PMThis will help them to get to know you better, so they can serve you personalized ads, whether you like it or not...
Basically it's a spy service masquerading as a \service\ wake up. What do you think they do with all that info dummies? If you had any brains you'd block it/them. The sites using them would stop using them very quickly if you did, cause you wouldn't see the adds and get a chance to be tricked into clicking on something they know will attract you, George Orwell would role over in his grave. Did you ever think that an akamai cookie was a bit out of place if you didn't hit the site? Not to mention the 'other' uses for the info.
Posted by: Dr at June 5, 2007 7:49 AMDr is right. Spy service. Part of echelon to spy on you. I knew for along time but really clears it up is that there is this company in Iraq that supplys weapons, bombs, grenades to anyone who basicly has a credit card and they use akamai. Our US Department of defense uses akamai too, now tell me why our country would have any interest in doing business with a company that also host Business's that sell weapons to terrorist?
Posted by: Wild3234 at September 11, 2007 3:08 PMLAWL paranoia reigns supreme! Who cares what anyone 'knows' about you based on your browsing habits. Everytime you clear your cookies that info is gone and besides it would have been 99.9% anonymous (other than ip) anyway.
Posted by: JoeSA at December 5, 2007 11:55 PMRather go and ask your bank and other financial institutions you use why and to whom they sell your spending habits .. I know because I've written data mining software for companies who use it. It's common practise.
Here is a solution I use with Firefox - http://noscript.net/ Here is what is written on their site:
"The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and others mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript and Java execution only for trusted domains of your choice"
Here is an article by PC World as noscript is one of the 100 Best Products of last year - 2006
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,123771-page,1/article.html
The PC World Top 100 list is here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125706-page,14-c,technology/article.html
2007's top 100 list is here:
Posted by: R. Vail at December 12, 2007 7:19 PMhttp://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131935-page,14-c,systems/article.html
Hope this helps ;)
Little Google search and wikipedia, should have been enough.
Posted by: Dee Dee at December 31, 2007 12:33 PMakamai is a site that keeps track of number of users, and other information, for sites like yahoo and et al.
And Dr, FYI companies like Yahoo, do need to keep track of number of hits.
akamai uses your information in all the above ways and may mix it up to further confuse you. It uses gif files which are really tracking devices like cookies along with providing it's cache service. It is most likely being watched by Big Brother through a statistic service and it will at times serve to gather some personal data if it can. And to JoeSA, they care a lot and clearing your cookies means nothing as the data mining is done whenever the page is refreshed through clicking a link or navigating. I have account with Yahoo and MS and why should I care if they make a statistic out of me? Well I'm not their number or a product of there dollar and I'm not a lab monkey.
Posted by: no follow at March 14, 2008 10:06 AMIt is!!! a from of spying and I have set my fire wall to block out akamai.net I noticed using System Internal`s TCP viewer that this pararsite akamai was leeching along with my browsing using port # 80, like typical spy ware does connecting to
Posted by: Bernhard at May 19, 2008 10:06 PMIP 72.246.51.XXX and if you blocked out a specific number XXX it would just resort to another one. So I blocked the entire range from
0 to 255. Now my browsing is A LOT QUICKER!
Is it not enough that every time you log into a
website NARUS along with programs like "Magic Lantern" and "Carnivore" steel your User Names and
Passwords, while "Triangle Boy" gets your real name and address from your ISP?....Why would you even begin to tolerate Jerks like "Akamai" who as the name implies think they are smarter than you!
Disable cookies, disable images, disable javascript, use Mozilla, or Firefox, and the addons NoScript, and AdBlock. No more garbage, no more spyware, no more bullshit.
And yes you can still access websites without akamai's garbage. So what if a few images don't show, I have them disabled anyway and can navigate yahoo's mail and other sites just fine.
NoScript only needs to allow mail.yahoo.com and mail.yimg.com to have mail work for yahoo. And only session cookies turned on for the same root names as for AdBlock.
Get a clue people.
Posted by: nunyabizniz at July 11, 2008 4:28 PMI have PCcillin. How do I block the akamai ip range.
Posted by: Carolyn at November 10, 2008 6:52 PM72.246.51.0-255. As you said .net only partially.