The disorder of the phoenixes

I caught "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix" at the Randwick Ritz today. While I still get giddy seeing JK Rowling's creations made film, I exited stage left thinking this was the weakest of the five adaptations thus far. David Yates' direction was terribly unsubtle and saved only by the source material and constellation of a cast (welcome and well done, Helena Bonham Carter). I'm sorry to read he's also helming "Half-Blood Prince". If only "Prisoner Of Azkaban"'s Alfonso Cuaron could have stayed for the rest of the series.

On to a real-life Phoenix - the villain (for want of a greyer term) of "Hackers: The Hunt For Australia's Most Infamous Computer Cracker" (2005) by Bill Apro and Graeme Hammond, which I completed today. It's a cheeky title given that the seminal work on the subject will forever be Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution" (1984). I should know, having written my English honours thesis on "Computer Hacking In Fiction And Non-fiction" and scrutinised nearly every major account published since. Toe-treading aside, Apro and Hammond's book is late on the scene, with the exploits of Melbourne cracker Phoenix and his pals Electron and Nom already extensively covered in Suelette Dreyfuss's "Underground" (1997) and the oft-repeated-on-the-ABC doco "In The Realm Of The Hackers" (2003). However, "H:T/H/F/A/M/I/C/C" does offer one significant new insight: Apro not only busted Phoenix, he formed the (now-defunct) Australian Federal Police Computer Crime Unit in the process, the difficulties of which he documents in detail. Shame the last 20-30 pages are a mess of less successful cases and bitterness at the politics that forced him out of the job.