PICS support, an idea & call for help

I've been trying to figure out exactly how hard it would be to add
PICS support to Squid. This is somewhat difficult for me, since I am
not very familiar with the Squid code, but I think I have a clear
enough idea of how it works to float an idea and see what people
think.

I'm thinking of adding a new acl called 'pics'. Its config line
would look like:

acl acl_name pics pics_url category relational_operator value

where

'pics_url' is the url of the ratings services
'category' is a category defined by the ratings service
'relational_operator' is one of <, >, =, <=, >=, !=
'value' is a number in the range defined by the ratings service as
     valid for category

This acl is not designed to work with ratings that are imbedded in the
HTML. It seems to me that it would be an awful ugly hack to put
support for PICS meta tags inside of Squid.

To check this acl, squid would just have to contact the ratings service,
parse the response, and check the match.

For those ratings systems without a ratings service, I would create a
'proxy' which would require a seperate web server. This proxy would
consist of a cgi script that accepts queries as if it were a ratings
service, fetches the HTML from the requested url, parses the META tags
for a given ratings system, and sends the ratings out as they would be
formatted by a ratings service. I realize that having an extra web
server is not an option for everyone, but I think this might be the
best solution to the problem.

Does anyone see any problems with doing this. If not, does anyone
want to help? Someone with a good understanding of the Squid source
would help immensely.

Thanks
Woogie
Received on Fri Mar 06 1998 - 06:42:34 MST