Some commentary about stuff.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz versus www.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz

We publish two different URLs for our Waltz at MIT website, namely https://stuff.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz and https://www.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz. Both URLs usually contain the same content, because they read out of the same directory in AFS.

https://stuff.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz

This web server is maintained by SIPB, a volunteer student computing group at MIT. The main advantage of this server is that when we make updates to our website, the changes get reflected online immediately. Unfortunately, as of 2019, this web server is frequently down due to hardware issues, and being volunteer-maintained, it doesn't get fixed very quickly.

https://www.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz

This web server is maintained by MIT employees specifically tasked to maintain MIT's computing infrastructure. The main advantage of this server is that it has very high availability; it probably won't go down. The main disadvantage of this server is that when we make updates to our website, changes take up to 15 minutes to become publicly visible. The web server is backed by an Akamai CDN (which gives it its high availability), and the delay is a countermeasure against DDoS attacks against MIT.

Incidentally, you can circumvent the countermeasure by attaching any new random query string to the URL, e.g., https://www.mit.edu/~kenta/waltz/?blah124 . (So it's not a great countermeasure.) So long as no one else has tried your random query string in the last 15 minutes, Akamai will give you the true latest version of the website. We use this method to test recent changes to the website when stuff.mit.edu is down, though it's annoying to have to change the URL each time to reload.

Another disadvantage is of www.mit.edu is that MIT by default inserts privacy-violating web trackers into all pages served from www.mit.edu, and MIT administration, despite hearing complaints, has deemed such a practice acceptable. We believe we have locally turned off these web trackers for our website, but there's no telling whether they might do something else similar or worse in the future in a way that can't be turned off.


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