One of the great cultural mysteries of the past few years has got to be the Matrix movies. How the Wachowski brothers produce a genre-defining first movie of a trilogy, then turn around and create two debacles that all but erased the achievement of the original film?

Well, here's a potential explanation: they stole the idea. Instead of reclusive geniuses, they're really just navel-gazing, cross-dressing hack thieves. A woman named Sophia Stewart has won a case against the brothers Wachowski, claiming that she submitted a screenplay upon which the Matrix was based to an ad calling for sci-fi scripts placed by the Wachowskis years ago. Here's the most damning paragraph from the article, in case you don't feel like registering with the site:

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that "credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers." These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been "often used during preparation of the motion pictures." The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success.

Obviously Larry and Andy aren't without talent -- Bound wasn't bad, and the Matrix movies are impressive technical achievements. But the franchise was clearly unable to live up to the cool premise that made the first movie so much fun -- I find this to be a pretty plausible explanation for why the series' quality fell so quickly.

Oh, and as to why you haven't heard of this case before? Stewart claims it's because Time Warner owns so much of the media. I'm not sure about that -- but on the other hand, if this is true it's a pretty major copyright infringement case, and I can't find any references to it on Google News, despite a lot of online message board discussion about the case.

If news had a smell, today it would reek of ozone and urine-soaked khakis. That's right -- it's time to be terrified of cyberterrorism. DHS has released its report on cybersecurity, including a rough evaluation of the threat posed by cyberterrorism, the looming explosion of cybercrime, and some cyberrecommendations for expanding the cyberbureacracy to cyberfight these menaces. Sorry; cybermenaces.

But before that, we've got former CIA chief Robert Gates warning about the grave threat of cyberterrorism, saying that it could be the most devastating weapon of mass destruction yet. From the AP story:

"When a teenage hacker in the Philippines overnight can wreak $10 billion in damage to the U.S. economy by implanting a virus, imagine what a sophisticated, well-funded effort to attack the computer base of our economy could accomplish"

...

He said the CIA and National Security Agency conducted an exercise six years ago, assigning 50 computer specialists to see how hard it would be to shut down the nation's electric grid. It took only two days for the group to put itself in a position to do so, he said.

"All you have to do is look at what happened in the northeast when you had a tree fall on a line in rural Ohio," he said of a blackout that affected cities from Detroit to New York last year. "What I am talking about is bringing the U.S. economy to its knees."

The first thing to note about all of this is that it's utter bullshit.

i don't normally go out to see movies on their opening nights, but since a) i am maniacally in love with jude law and b) i had a few friends who wanted to see it, we headed out to the gallery place/chinatown theater on friday night to see "closer". there are minor spoilers here and there, so i'll put it behind the cut.