by Claudine Zap Here's a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true. An unknown producer from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez , shelled out about $300 to create a cool video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, the capitol of Uruguay. The four-minute short, " Ataque de Panico !" (Panic Attack) features ginormous (but slow-moving) weapon-wielding robots that blow stuff up.

by Mike Krumboltz 20 years ago tonight, " The Simpsons " premiered on Fox. In the two decades since, Homer, Marge and the rest of the maniacal citizens of Springfield have aired over 300 episodes, starred in a movie and a slew of videogames, and have remained one of the more popular searches on Yahoo!. In honor of their show's considerable contribution to pop culture, we tracked down the 20 most popular Simpsons characters in Search. Homer tops the list (woo hoo!),

In several key respects, the Android platform has almost caught up to the iPhone, according to new statistics from comScore. There are still a lot more iPhones floating around in the great, wide world, of course, but otherwise, Android's doing extremely well. Let's start with the table below. It illustrates that, more than the average smartphone user, Android users do a lot of things other than talk.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), along with nine other privacy and consumer organizations, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charging that Facebook's recent changes to user privacy settings violate federal consumer protection law. The EPIC complaint wants the FTC to open an investigation into the changes made by Facebook to the privacy setting of its users and require the social network to restore privacy safeguards.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has announced an update to its Digital Video Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines . The update addresses digital video content and ads that play automatically when a web page loads, which the IAB says is an increasingly common occurrence. The IAB defines an auto-play ad as a video ad or a video ad linked with video content that initiates "play" with out a user interaction or without a user activity starting the video.

Today, at 8 a.m. ET, a panel of world climate leaders, among them former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and journalist Thomas Friedman, will gather in Copenhagen and answer the top questions that you submitted to the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate channel . You can watch them address the issues that matter to you in real-time: We'll be live-streaming the debate at www.youtube.com/cop15 . Thank you for making this event truly international.

French people cannot get rid off their mobile phones, according to a TNS Sofres study, conducted amongst 1200 people older than 12 years old late August 2009. Indeed, 79% of them declared owning one, with 20% never letting it go, even when going to the bathroom (about 8%). Moreover, about 23% use it to go on the internet, and this percentage goes up to 41% for the ones having between 12 to 24 years old. However, only about 4%  use their mobile phone to watch TV,

SFGate, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, sent out an e-mail last night that struck me as intriguing. The message was dedicated to the site's "Fan Shop," while offering clothing merchandise for San Francisco 49er and Oakland Raider fans. And nary a news story appeared. No content at all. Just merch. The message uses the subject line: "SFGate: Give sports gear gifts this year! Visit our FanShop!" Three HTML images dominate the design, one each for men's, women's,

Google has launched a "new and improved" version of Google Transliteration as a Google Labs experiment. Users can simply go to google.com/transliterate and type in the box to have their words converted to the proper language. There are 17 that are currently supported. Google explains : Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language.

Whether or not you've heard of a corporation called MWV, you're probably familiar with its products - MWV puts out everything from Coca-Cola packaging to Mead notebooks to asphalt for roads. And now, this giant has entrusted some of the technical aspects of its operation to Google Apps. Given that MWV has a market cap of roughly $4.75 billion and employs about 12,000 people, this counts as a big - and tough - job. Moreover, those employees are spread out over 34 countries,