At the age of 34 Patrick Naughton was a demigod of the Internet industry.
The New York-born son of Irish immigrants was, as he put it himself, "at the top of the food chain".
But the glory days ended in September when he was arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old girl he met through an Internet chatroom. Naughton did not know the "13-year-old" was an FBI agent.
His story illustrates the use of the Internet for the abuse of children (police also found pornographic pictures of children on his laptop).
Naughton does not conform to the image of the dirty old man hanging around school playgrounds. He is educated, successful and middle class. "When I go home to Rochester now, my mother talks incessantly about me and my success," he told Forbes magazine in 1998.
This, in fact, is much closer to the reality of paedophiles than the image usually held of them. The profile of the overwhelming majority of 413 paedophiles caught in one FBI Internet operation was that they are middle class, white and well educated.
While the Internet provides opportunities for paedophiles, it also brings risks for them.
If anyone should have had the know-how to escape detection it was Naughton. He was one of the creators of the Java programming language and claims to have initiated it.
Yet Naughton spent months in a chat-room, using the nickname "hotseattle", exchanging messages with what he thought were two underage girls, allegedly soliciting sex from them and even going so far as to give them identifying information about himself.
Ultimately, the need for new material and the need to communicate with others expose the Internet paedophile to risk. Naughton took that risk and was destroyed by it.
He was convicted in December for possessing child pornography, but by January the soliciting charge was mired in legal problems.
Whatever the outcome of Naughton's legal battles, his future in the Internet industry is dead.