Help pease

I had an un-nerving experience recently when I received an IM from a total stranger who seemed to know things which I had only talked about in ‘chat’ and in a place where I am certain that here was no one within 50m of me.
A friend tells me that things called ‘chat bugs’ may be being used on me, Is that true? And if it is, is there anyway I can detect it and find out who the listener is?. Sure I can converse in IM’s, I know that, but what else can I do?

Yes, there are such things as chat bugs.

You can buy scripted objects that detect them and tell you who they belong to, although the detection is not 100% accurate.

Yes, open chat can be monitored and relayed by script, either from an attachment worn by the monitored AV (so it gets everything the wearer says wherever they go), or by a fixed "listening device." There's not a huge amount you can do about it, unless you can identify the object responsible. (It'll be scripted, so beacons may help some, but... well, lots of things are scripted, so it may be difficult to pick out the "bug"--and for that matter, it may no longer be present.)

AFAIK, scripted "bug detectors" can't do much better than to sense other scripted objects in their vicinity; I know of no way for such a device to detect an open listen on channel 0 or any other feature relevant to isolating "bugs" from many totally unrelated scripts.

But... the way these things very often work out, in fact, is that the one person within 20m of you when you were chatting (unless you were chatting to yourself) just leaked the chat log to somebody else. That is, while a scripted chat bug is surely possible, the low-tech explanation shouldn't be ignored.

Another much more scary possibility exists: someone could have managed to sneak spyware onto the machine where you or your chat partner was running the viewer at the time. Very unlikely, but possible.

yes just like real life the walls have ears.

yes chat bugs seem to be the latest craze of the gossip Bishes..
i've had a few used on me..i really love when they change the chat around or add things to the chat then send them out in group notices..

just Find the scripted item if you can and AR the bishes and anyone else that was around have them AR them too..

Thankyou. Yumi, could you IM me about where I can find the detector you mentioned?

There are several different makes and I wouldn't like to "funnel" in the direction of any one. As I mentioned it's not a 100% certain technique which means that the scripts are still being developed, so comparing the competition will be a good idea.