Patrick Naughton | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Education | Clarkson University |
Occupation | software developer / executive |
Known for | the Java programming language, internet sex crime [1] and the fantasy defense. [2] |
Criminal charge(s) | traveling in interstate commerce with the intent to have sex with a minor, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §2423(b). [3] [4] [5] |
Criminal penalty | sentenced to five years of probation, nine months of home detention and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine [6] |
Criminal status | guilty [1] |
Patrick Naughton is an American software developer and convicted sex offender. He is one of the creators of the Java programming language.
In 1983, Naughton co-wrote a MacPaint clone, Painter's Apprentice, with Russ Nelson. [7]
As a Sun Microsystems engineer, Patrick Naughton had become frustrated with the state of Sun's C++ and C APIs (application programming interfaces) and tools.[ citation needed ] While considering moving to NeXT, Naughton was offered a chance to work on new technology and thus the Stealth Project was started.[ citation needed ]
The Stealth Project was soon renamed to the Green Project with James Gosling and Mike Sheridan joining Naughton. Together with other engineers, they began work in a small office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. They were attempting to develop a new technology for programming next generation smart appliances, which Sun expected to be a major new opportunity. [8] [ self-published source ] [9]
In June and July 1994, after three days of brainstorming with John Gage, the Director of Science for Sun, James Gosling, Bill Joy, Naughton, Wayne Rosing, and Eric Schmidt, the team re-targeted the platform for the World Wide Web. They felt that with the advent of the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, the Internet was on its way to evolving into the same highly interactive medium that they had envisioned for cable TV. As a prototype, Naughton wrote a small browser, WebRunner, later renamed HotJava. [10]
In 1994, Naughton quit Sun for Starwave (then a property of Paul Allen) to develop server Java applications for web sites. [10] He was the author of "The Java Handbook", ( ISBN 0-07-882199-1, Osborne, 1995) and co-author of Java: The Complete Reference, with Herbert Schildt ( ISBN 0-07-882231-9, Osborne, 1996)
In 1998, Walt Disney Internet Group acquired Starwave and amalgamated it with Infoseek in the Go Network company. As a result, Naughton became executive vice president of Infoseek.
After his arrest in 1999, Naughton was fired from Infoseek. [4]
On Sept. 14, 1999, Naughton flew from Seattle to Los Angeles on a private Disney jet. [11] expecting a five-foot, blonde haired 13-year-old girl to wait on the pier near the roller coaster, carrying a green backpack as instructed by Naughton. [2] Naughton had written to her about love and sex and that he "wanted to get [her] alone in his hotel room and have [her] strip naked for him". [2] Naughton had arranged this meeting, posing as "Hot Seattle", his online predator handle [3] in an online chat room called "dad&daughtersex." [12] The "girl" was actually an FBI agent. [6]
Two days later, he was arrested by the FBI and was charged with traveling in interstate commerce with the intent to have sex with a minor, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §2423(b). [3] [4] [5] After a trial ended in a hung jury, Naughton struck a plea agreement where he took a reduced sentence and admitted that he traveled from Seattle to Los Angeles last September with a "dominant purpose" to engage in sexual acts with "KrisLA", an online chat buddy he believed was a 13-year-old girl. [1] He ended up serving no prison time, in exchange for working for the FBI for free for a year. [13] [14]
His line of defense was that he claimed he was persuaded to participate online in a ritualized sexual role-playing exercise, dealing with a mature woman acting as a girl. [14] His then-novel defense, became known as the fantasy defense for pedophiles. [2]
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
James Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language.
WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search.
Starwave was a Seattle, Washington-based software and website company, founded in 1993 by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and led by CEO Mike Slade. The company produced original CD-ROM titles, including Muppets Inside, and titles for Clint Eastwood, Sting, and Peter Gabriel. They were the original developers of Castle Infinity, the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game for children, but Starwave's most lasting mark was in the area of web content sites. They developed ESPN.com, ABCNEWS.com, Outside Online, and Mr. Showbiz.com among other sites, setting the standard for much of the commercial Internet explosion of the late 1990s. Starwave also developed the first site and publishing system for Jim Cramer's TheStreet.com.
HotJava was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then-new technology. It has since been discontinued and is no longer supported. Furthermore, the Sun Download Center was taken down on July 31, 2011, and the download link on the official site points to a placeholder page saying so.
Write once, run anywhere (WORA), or sometimes Write once, run everywhere (WORE), was a 1995 slogan created by Sun Microsystems to illustrate the cross-platform benefits of the Java language. Ideally, this meant that a Java program could be developed on any device, compiled into standard bytecode, and be expected to run on any device equipped with a Java virtual machine (JVM). The installation of a JVM or Java interpreter on chips, devices, or software packages became an industry standard practice.
Perverted Justice Foundation, Inc., more commonly known as Perverted-Justice, was an American organization based in California and Oregon which investigated, identified, and publicized the conduct of adults who have used chat rooms and other social media in order to solicit online sexual conversations and in-person meetings with minors. Their website serves as an archive of collected data on these investigations, which they make available in order to assist law enforcement and the public in understanding the behavior and child grooming techniques of online hebephiles.
Infoseek was an American internet search engine founded in 1994 by Steve Kirsch.
Sexual grooming is the action or behavior used to establish an emotional connection with a minor under the age of consent, and sometimes the child's family, to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse. It can occur in various settings, including online, in person, and through other means of communication. Children who are groomed may experience mental health issues, including "anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and suicidal thoughts."
Java is a set of computer software and specifications that provides a software platform for developing application software and deploying it in a cross-platform computing environment. Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms from embedded devices and mobile phones to enterprise servers and supercomputers. Java applets, which are less common than standalone Java applications, were commonly run in secure, sandboxed environments to provide many features of native applications through being embedded in HTML pages.
Anti-pedophile activism encompasses social actions against pedophiles. It also includes acts of anti-pedophile citizen vigilantism conducted by vigilante groups, some of which have operated alongside government agencies in countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM) is a discontinued proprietary Java virtual machine from Microsoft. It was first made available for Internet Explorer 3 so that users could run Java applets when browsing on the World Wide Web. It was the fastest Windows-based implementation of a Java virtual machine for the first two years after its release. Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, sued Microsoft in October 1997 for incompletely implementing the Java 1.1 standard. It was also named in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust civil actions, as an implementation of Microsoft's "Embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. In 2001, Microsoft settled the lawsuit with Sun and discontinued its Java implementation.
Oak is a discontinued programming language created by James Gosling in 1989, initially for Sun Microsystems' set-top box project. The language later evolved to become Java.
Disney Interactive is an American video game and internet company that oversees various websites and interactive media owned by The Walt Disney Company.
Patrick Peter Chan is a Canadian computer scientist based in Silicon Valley, California. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, he attended the University of British Columbia, and the University of Waterloo. He holds a master's in Computer Science and has made some contributions to the field.
Simon Phipps is a computer scientist and web and open source advocate.
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, as well as Sun's software product lines, including the Java programming language.
The fantasy defense is a legal defense wherein a defendant accused of attempting a crime claims that they never intended to complete the crime. Instead, they claim they were engaged in a fantasy and, in the case of luring a minor, believed they were dealing with an adult.
Online predators are individuals who commit child sexual abuse that begins or takes place on the Internet.
At his criminal trial, Naughton employed what has come to be known as the "fantasy defense": citing his technical sophistication and the adult tone of his interlocutor's conversation, he claimed that he believed her to be an adult woman playing the role of a teenage girl; which, indeed, she was, although for different reasons from those Naughton claimed to have believed.