On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:27:20AM -0500, Alan Corey wrote: > I'm wondering if it's possible to do content filtering in a firewall. > Maybe with something that cooperates with pf. I'm on a very limited > (5 GB/month) metered internet connection through a cell phone and I'm > not the only user when I have it shared over wifi. I'd like to block > video because it's an incredible waste. Problematic clients are > Android/Kindle. User competence in not clicking where they shouldn't > is sometimes an issue. > > I can see this happening if there's a file size available during > transfers, if the size is under a certain threshold value it just > passes without interference, over a certain size the first few bytes > of the file get checked. If it fails the check that exact URL to the > file would get blacklisted for maybe 24 hours. I've noticed watching > random transfers with wget that in some cases it knows the file size > from somewhere and sometimes not. Presumably there's no size > available on streaming video so just block it. > > There seems to be an abundance of video in advertising in apps but > also in news apps there's a mix of video and text stories. Most of > the world assumes bandwidth is free and fast. Some videos are bigger > than entire operating systems, and most are fairly pointless. If the > transfer is happening over an ssl connection maybe not much can be > done since from the firewall's perspective it's just encrypted data, > essentially inside a tunnel.
That sounds like work for Squid in intercepting proxy. j.
