Utu is the Maori word for a system of revenge used by Maori society to
provide social controls and retribution. Utu is also a protocol that
uses cryptographic models of social interaction to allow peers to vote
on their dislike of other peer's behavior. The goal of Utu is to
experiment with the effects of bringing identity, reputation, and
retribution to human communications on the Internet. A secondary goal
is wiping out IRC because apparently nobody really likes IRC.
This presentation will cover the protocol's design, use of cryptography,
secure coding practices, and an analysis of it's adoption and current
research results. The presentation is for medium to advanced
participants interested in similar open source projects. In the spirit
of openness and collaboration and just plain evil, there will be an Utu
server running for conference participants to use during the
conference. The goal is to present the system, get people thinking,
and obtain feedback on the design and implementation."Zed A. Shaw is the author of a Ruby web server named Mongrel and a
frequent speaker at conferences and user groups around the US. He's
currently working as a software developer and tinkers on open source
projects in his spare time.
