The Green Man is a big fan of the internet but, like every powerful tool, it can be misused and one of the most repulsive misuses of the net is the preying on children in chat rooms by paedophiles.

New Scientist reports that Jim Wightman, an IT consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in UK has developed a new weapon in the fight to detect and report this predatory behaviour. The software call ChatNannies generates applets called Nanniebots that engage in conversations in chatrooms listening for predatory convseration styles. Conversations that are identified by the software as being likely to be predatory are reported with the address of the suspect to the police for investigation.

The nanniebots are so good at imitating a childs chatroom behaviour that to date none have been sprung. Wightman currently has around 10,000 nanniebots chatting away in chatrooms ever vigilant to small inconsistencies in conversations that hint at an adult pretending to be a child. Based on a neural network the software is continually learning about the use of language and adapting its conversations to make them more realistic.

Follow the New Scientist link above and see if you can pick which is the child and which is the nanniebot.