Well, it simply does not get more exciting than this. Our website has not yet been up for a month and Standing There Productions has been hacked by robots. Yes, robots.

Yesterday afternoon, human time, our film site (www.icouldbeanybody.com.au) was suddenly not quite as informative it once had been, at least not about our film. I was extremely busy at the time, having a drink in a bar full of rowdy construction workers, so I couldn’t make out what Stewart was saying when he called. Stewart (who is fast earning his credit as post production supervisor) is sick with a head cold at the moment, so it was like talking on the phone to Barry Manilow from the back of a Guns N Roses concert. Eventually, with my hand over my ear, I deciphered “website” and “hacked”, which was somewhat alarming, except for the fact that these two words were closely followed by the word “Nick”. U.S. Republicans say that Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet, but I suspect they are overlooking the possibility that he could have had quite a bit of help from Nick Jaffe, who helped us set up our website, became virtually our entire camera department on I Could Be Anybody, and who I’ve now discovered also apparently battles robots. Of course he does.

I asked Nick who it was who hacked our site and why they targeted Standing There Productions – had we become an international symbol of all that is wrong with contemporary do-it-yourself filmmaking? Was this a political protest? A cry for help? Were we being targeted because of the subversive secret messages in Rita’s biog?

No, apparently. We were targeted because our password was so crap that a robot could decipher it.

That, and the hacking wasn’t even interesting. I'll post the actual hack image above this when I finally work out how to do it. It's very dull. Nevertheless, this act of vandalism will not go undramatised. We will be holding high level meetings in the New Year to develop new security measures (ie a password that isn’t the actual word PASSWORD) and our spirit shall not be weakened. It is true that our art has been defaced and our spirits dampened, but we are determined to get on with our lives despite the activities of our robot oppressors.

We humans must be strong. Fight on, good friends.