On 03/27/99(03:44) you Steve Shockley <ppmaqbdyi-rcwevegyz7tr.ml@ml.delegate.org> wrote
in <_A379@delegate-en.ML_>
 |There's an organization called Junkbusters (<http://www.junkbusters.com>)
 |who makes a filtering proxy that can cut out anything from ads to
 |cookies, etc.
 |I like their product (especially for the ad-filtering), but it's low
 |performance compared to DeleGate, and only does http. Could you consider
 |adding regexp based filtering to DeleGate?

In existing DeleGate, MOUNT is the parameter which can be used for
access control based on patterns of URL path, like this:

  MOUNT="http://wall.etl.go.jp/delegate/* /path/of/err.cgi"

  [the content of /path/of/err.cgi]
  #!/bin/sh
  echo 'Status: 403'
  echo ''
  echo 'Forbidden by rule.'

But I'm enough aware of the limited matching power of MOUNT parameter
including its limited regular expression, limited lexical only host-name
matching in the left hand URL, naive inefficient linear search, and so on.
In past some time I announced the replacement of the MOUNT with more
generalized regular expression using a unified automaton from give regular
expressions.  But I could not achieve it because I think it could make
unexpected bad influence over all behavior of DeleGate, thus it should be
done when the major version of DeleGate changes, and there have been so
many practical problems to be solved prior to it.

Well, since the beginning of this year, I've been thinking about what to
do in the next version of DeleGate (6.X), and making the MOUNT parameter
be more powerful is one of top priorities again.  If the enhancement is
done, your demand could be satisfied naturally.

Another thing I think should be done in the next version is supporting
PICS <URL:http://www.w3.org/PICS/>, which will be mapped onto MOUNT
mechanism in DeleGate, and I suppose we can convert Junkbuster's filter
specifications into PICSRules.

Here are other mechanisms including CFI script and SMTPGATE script which
should be redesigned and unified based on such an enhanced filtering
mechanism, in future...

Cheers,
Yutaka
--
Yutaka Sato <ysato@etl.go.jp> http://www.etl.go.jp/~ysato/   @ @ 
Computer Science Division, Electrotechnical Laboratory      ( - )
1-1-4 Umezono, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8568 Japan            _<   >_