iTunes page
You can only add official links and web archive, redistributed links are a breach of copyright and not something that we allow here. --IAdam1n (talk) 19:43, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
wikipedia:Akamai is not a "redistribution". It's a CDN service, that is usually (if not always) only used by large companies. While I don't have a real time machine to go back to 2004 to prove that Apple themselves used these links, I have 99% confidence.
The akamai.info.apple.com domain name contained in the URL further corroborates this; it's a common practice for companies to dedicate a domain name to Akamai, and for Akamai to contain that domain name in the CDN URL.
--Jack980517 (talk) 19:48, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
To further explain this, I'll use an example:
For the URL http://a1408.g.akamai.net:80/7/1408/1388/20040419/akamai.info.apple.com/iTunes4/WW/win/019-0134.20040427.98hsb/iTunesSetup.exe [Archived 2005-11-20 at the Wayback Machine], it could be accessed with both this URL (which would be the "real" URL because the file is actually stored at Akamai), and the URL http://akamai.info.apple.com/iTunes4/WW/win/019-0134.20040427.98hsb/iTunesSetup.exe[permanent dead link]. The apple.com URL may or may not redirect to the akamai.net URL.
I remember seeing this practice on many websites, especially back in the day. Because of this, I looked up what Akamai was. It's clear that you didn't. --Jack980517 (talk) 19:57, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
- Ah ok, I apologies for that, we've had some illegal links added recently and since I hadn't heard of it, I was thinking it was the same. I'll revert my edit so yours shows again. Thanks for the explanation. --IAdam1n (talk) 20:01, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
In fact I'm almost certain that secure-appldnld.apple.com, or appldnld.apple.com for that matter, never hosted these versions of iTunes. It probably didn't exist back then, and all downloads went through Akamai. The fact that the path is completely the same corroborates this; Apple probably just moved to their own domain (and possibly servers) and kept all the folder structure, because why not.
Slapping on a secure-appldnld.apple.com link is silly, because that link was probably never pointed to by Apple.