On Saturday 26 July 2003 12:32 pm, Bgs himself wrote: > Hi ! > > I'm thinking about an open db and the squid list seems to be a good > starting point. > My plan: create a reverse DNS based web page category database. It would > be similar to the *RBL systems. The db is a pseudo reverse DNS server.
RBL works for mail servers because a hostname is either a mailserver, or it isn't. I don't see the idea working so neatly for web servers, because a single website can have many many different types of content in subpages - just think of www.geocities.com for a fairly extreme example of this. Also a reverse lookup when processing an incoming email may add a few seconds to the transmission time - but who cares? The same is not true of website access - people would care a lot (and complain). > By querying the db you get back a 32 bit info which contains information > about category, sub category, rating and category specific custom flags. > > Something like: > www.something.com gives you a.b.c.d pseudo IP number where: > > 'a' is the category ID > 'b' is the sub category ID > 'c' is the rating > 'd' is the custom flag I think a big difficulty here would be the question of whether your idea of illegal / undesirable / objectionable / etc content is the same as mine - one person's humour site may be another person's idea of pornography... > The db would be user managed: everyone could add (with proper checking of > course) new sites. After a while this might grow into an uptodate db. Email RBLs can be automatically checked - you don't need a person to decide whether a mail server is an open relay or not, and databases like Razor and DCC help to check for machines which spew out spam on a regular basis. I don't see that this is possible with websites - there would be much more human decision-making involved (if the website contents can be checked automatically, why not just do it on your own proxy server instead of in a centralised database?) So, although it seems like a nice idea, I can't say that I think it's particularly feasible. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else thinks otherwise, though, and I'm happy to discuss off this list if that's preferred. Antony. -- Software development can be quick, high-quality, or low-cost. The customer gets to pick any two out of three.
