5/3/2009

Man uses YouTube to help deliver baby

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

When you’ve already used YouTube videos to learn to solve the Rubik’s Cube and play the guitar, you might think that learning to do anything else would be fairly simple.

Delivering a baby, for example.

Marc Stephens, a naval engineer from Cornwall, England, and an afficionado of YouTube learning, thought it might be instructive or, who knows, fun, to check out the child-birthing thing on the site as his wife Jo was feeling a few tweaks in her innards.

So there he was at 10:30 p.m., watching where to put your hands, when to pull, how to twist. Oh, you surely don’t expect me to watch one of these things, do you? I can tell you that one of the videos was called “How to Deliver a Baby in a Taxicab.”

Anyway, four hours later, Jo went into labor.

They were planning on a home birth, but Marc called the hospital and asked for one of the actresses out of the YouTube movie. You know, the one who played the nurse.

No, in truth, there were no midwives available to come to the house, and Jo had a habit of laboring with efficient speed (they already had three children).

Indeed, she suddenly popped out of the bathroom, went down on all fours and was ready to go.

So, Marc thought: “OK. If I can move the yellow square to the left and those two blue squares to the right…no, wait, that’s the Rubik’s YouTube video.”

Remarkably, he thought about the taxicab video and kept his head while he held the baby’s.

Twitter’s network gets breached again

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

Twitter has confirmed that someone broke into its network and gained access to 10 accounts, which appear to include Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher, according to screenshots posted on a French blog site.

“Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post Thursday afternoon.

“Personal information that may have been viewed on these 10 individual accounts includes email address, mobile phone number (if one was associated with the account), and the list of accounts blocked by that user,” the posting said. “Password information was not revealed or altered, nor were personal messages (direct messages) viewed.”

Stone did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Will ‘Wolverine’ benefit from (Bit)Torrent of publicity?

Filed under: — Aviran Mordo

After a raw version of the movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” leaked to the Web last month, 20th Century Fox is hoping the action pic, which debuts Friday, is nearly as durable.

Hollywood has been in a near frenzy since April 1, when someone–who has yet to be identified–leaked a copy of “Wolverine” to the Web. The fear was that the unauthorized copy would hurt ticket sales. “Wolverine” cost more than $100 million to make.

Some people won’t bother to spend money at the theater when they can watch it for free online, goes one argument. Since it hit the Internet, the pirated copy has been downloaded more than 4.1 million times, according to BigChampagne, which does market research that focuses on file-sharing networks.

Another of Hollywood’s concerns is that people who download work prints of movies, as was the case with “Wolverine,” are seeing incomplete versions. The studios say they’re worried some people will be turned off by the unfinished works and that they’ll spread word that the movie is a stinker. So far, none of that appears to have happened.

Fandango, the online movie-ticketing services, is reporting hundreds of sold out shows across the country (not all of them sold through Fandango). The Los Angeles Times wrote Friday the film appears headed “toward a solid but not spectacular opening around $85 million.”

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