Posts by Don Mitchell

iOS 7's weak random number generator stuns kernel security – claim

Never use RAND()

There is a long history of bad random number generators in operating systems. At Bell Labs, Jim Reeds and I implemented a series of statistical randomness tests (Knuth's plus others) to explore this problem. BSD 4.something was out then, and my lab was using it. The random generator was a linear feedback type, and it failed the tests badly. Jim and I discovered that there was an off-by-one mistake in the position of the feedback tap, but when we contacted the student at UCB who wrote it, he told us to fuck off. Even today, you can find both the fixed and the broken version of this generator in UNIX distributions. Of course the random generator in windows was always terrible (16 bits, like this apple subroutine).

A very good generator is Marsaglia's multiply-with-carry. Fast, simple, and it passes every test I've ever tried.

unsigned ML_nMarsagliaX = 886459;

unsigned ML_nMarsagliaC = 361290869;

unsigned

ML_RandomUnsigned()

{

unsigned __int64 n;

n = __emulu(1965537969, ML_nMarsagliaX);

n = n + ML_nMarsagliaC;

ML_nMarsagliaX = unsigned(n & 0xFFFFFFFF);

ML_nMarsagliaC = unsigned(n >> 32);

return ML_nMarsagliaX;

}

These are not cryptographically strong generators, and I'm not sure what iOS is doing with them. They are appropriate for things like monte carlo calculations and simulations, but not for cryptography.

Web inventor Berners-Lee: I so did NOT see this cat vid thing coming

Meh

The web is hugely important, but its origin was a quick hack. TBL's success is sort of accidental, like Zuckerberg, except without the billion dollars. They'd both be mid-level developers or IT staff somewhere in any alternate history. He's not a dummy of course, but he's also not an industry-wide visionary or "the greatest genius since Einstein" as was said when he won a recent award.

Winklevoss twins say their Bitcoins will take them to SPAAAAACE

Winklevi

Write Facebook: $billion idea

Claim to have invented Facebook first: $60 million idea

Stephen Fry rewrites computer history again: This time it's serious

Re: About time

That's a pretty delusional history of OS/2 and Windows NT, Uncle Ron.

The history of software may never be written accurately, because there is so much politics and zealous fandom. A typical amateur opinion runs something like: "I hate Microsoft, I hate Windows, I hate Bill Gates...now let me tell you an objective history of computer software." You can't just take Microsoft's version of the story, or IBM's, or Kildall's. All these people have a bias, and a real historian would have to dig very deep for records and talk to a lot of different people.

But I think it is safe to say that IBM did not write Windows NT. I'd love to be there if you told that to Dave Cutler. There wouldn't even be a wet spot on the floor where you were standing.

Google stabs Wikipedia in the front

Search Paradigms that Google Doesn't Control...Yet

Google has the major share of online advertising locked up. It's their cash cow. A couple years ago, a high level tech-firm manager told me that Google only feared two things: Facebook and Wikipedia. Not just because they had ads, but because they represented two information-search paradigms that Google didn't control. So this article should come as no surprise.

Low power WON'T bag ARM the server crown. So here's how to upset Intel

Re: ARM in the data centre is a certainty unless Intel can find a way to kill it.

Intel has a more sophisticated form of parallelism, using parallel functional units So you get parallel operations, and even room to run hyper threads, were two threads make interleaved use of the functional units. This seems inherently more efficient than duplicated whole single-thread cpu cores.

Intel's mistake was not having a low-wattage part for phones. But the economics of servers is about watts per operation.

Snowden docs: NSA building encryption-cracking quantum computer

An Ellsberg or a Rosenberg?

It is obvious that the NSA would investigate quantum computing, since code breaking is a major part of their charter and history. I'm sure the British and Russians are doing the same.

This latest leak is not a case of "whistleblowing". Snowden has revealed activities that bring up important 4th amendment issues, but he also indiscriminately leaked secret information about legal and sensitive activities of the NSA. Thus many of my American friends have questions about his character.

I consider Daniel Ellsberg to be a hero, while I consider Julius Rosenberg to be a traitor. Snowden is probably at neither end of that range, but time will tell where he falls on it.

Re: Not all darkness

Ken Thompson proved that you can insert exploits into software without having it appear in the source code. It would be especially easy for open source software.

Android, Chromebooks storm channel as Windows PC sales go flat

Re: So if we award all desktops to Microsoft then I make it...

LOL "chromebook deniers".

How much did NSA pay to put a backdoor in RSA crypto? Try $10m – report

Re: Back in the 70s

IBM did a cipher called Lucifer which used a larger block and key size, but was actually weaker than DES. The NSA knew about so-called "bent functions", s-boxes designed to be extremely nonlinear and therefore more resistant to linear-approximation attacks.

Fragged, fragged and thrice fragged! 20 years of id Software’s Doom

Carmack Genius

Princeton University had few Macs or PCs in 1994, it was really a UNIX workstation shop. But one grad student had a Windows PC for some project, and he showed me DOOM. I went and got Prof. Pat Hanrahan and showed him. Pat and I tried to figure out, how could a 486 processor be doing real-time 3D? It seemed impossible. The perspective mapping requires a 1/distance division operation at each pixel, and that is totally beyond the computational power of the PCs of that time.

A couple years alter, I got to meet Carmack and talk with other people in the game development field who knew how the software worked. Visibility in DOOM was calculated in the 2D floor plan projection. Polygons were rendered in vertical or horizontal scans of constant distance, so only one division per line, not per pixel. Really an elegant solution.

Later the brilliant Ken Silverman wrote probably the first (and probably the only robust) "free-direction texture mapper", which could scan convert polygons along lines of constant direction at any angle, not just vertical or horizontal rows of pixels. So you were not limited to DOOM's vertical walls and horizontal floors, you could render general polygons in space. That's tricky to get right with now pixel glitches, and among game developers, he was much admired. But free-direction mappers never really got deployed, there was just Ken's unreleased neo-Build engine that used it experimentally.

Eventually people just learned how to interpolate the 1/distance division across horizontal spans of pixels, and they got that code to run fast enough that the "British Three" could render arbitrary textured polygons on a PC (the three major British rendering engines, Renderware and two others I forget now). Microsoft bought one of those British companies and formed the beginning of Direct3D. Not very successful, and it was all rewritten a few versions later.

Hardware acceleration eventually made all this clever work obsolete.

Microsoft touts SCROOGLE merch: Hopes YOU'LL PAY to dump on rival

Re: hmmm

RedneckMBA, if we wanted real information about computer technology we'd be reading Anandtech.

It's risky for Microsoft to be running these scroogled ads, since they are not without sin. But I am glad that people are made more aware of practices like email scraping. Google has built a surveillance machine that must make the NSA envious.

That time when an NSA bloke's son borked the ENTIRE INTERNET...

RTM

I know Morris and his dad (his father worked in dept 1127 at Bell Labs, where UNIX was created, before moving to the NSA). He was a bright kid, and I'm sure he intended no real harm, but it was certainly poor judgment. The whole affair seems to have been very traumatic for him, and he's never discussed it or responded to any questions or comments about it.

Several years before the he wrote the worm, Morris was a summer intern at the labs, and he helped me convert a fast DES subroutine I wrote, to perform the UNIX password hashing operation. As I understand it, he incorporated that code in the worm, and Spafford wondered in his report where it came from.

The worm is also a tribute to the crappy programming and systems design that seems to go into all email software. Sendmail was a never-ending source of security problems in the early days of BSD UNIX, and it was an unbelievable resource hog. When it first came out, it had a remote root-shell feature, the author put in to make it easier for him to troubleshoot it. Thoughtless. We called it "mailer science". When BSD 4.3 came out, sending an email to all 40 or so people in our division would take 5 or 10 minutes of processing time, the whole system was brought to its knees.

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Tiresome Stross

Just more leftist hot air from Charlie Stross. His fascination with free software is certainly about his anti-business political views, not a knowledgeable technical opinion. Who cares what he thinks about technology or politics?

It's a pity that young people do not see more science fiction that is about adventure and science. Jules Verne inspired generations of men to become scientists and engineers. One can only imagine Charlie Stross inspiring a generation of young people to be cynical and pessimistic.

Bill Gates again world's richest, tops in US for 20th straight year

Bill & Burgers

OK, as a former Microsoft Research employee, I can't let terrible inaccuracy this stand. Dick's Is in Seattle, Billg and his buddies ate at Burger Master. Today most burger fans eat at Five Guys or Wibbley's.

When I was still at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1980s, the company met with Microsoft to discuss some business conflict (I think it involved Cingular, or some satellite cellular scheme, but I don't recall the details now). AT&T rented a room in one of New York City's most exclusive restaurants, and billg and some other Microsoft execs joined them. When the waiter came to take Bill's order, he said, "I don't see anything on this menu I like, but I noticed there's a Burger King across the street. Would you bring me a whopper with cheese?". The waiter was unfazed, but the AT&T execs were completely floored. True story...my boss Arun Netravali was there at that dinner meeting and told me about it.

Happy 20th birthday, Windows NT 3.1: Microsoft's server outrider

NT had a good solid API for systems programming

There's a nice little book by Johnson Hart, "Win32 System Programming" that shows off the kernel API. When NT was being designed, UNIX in its various inconstant forms was a mess, still had very poor features for memory allocation, threads, concurrency, etc. The problem was that nobody with a professional understanding of operating systems and requirements could sit down and do it over again, and NT was exactly that. Asynchronous I/O, threads, multiple heaps, completion ports, a real event mechanism (UNIX signals were really useless in the old days), a wide variety of concurrency mechanisms, choices to wait for events, poll for events, etc. Windows was also modular, with well defined interface mechanisms, dynamic linking, device deriver interfaces. All things UNIX did not have in the 1980s (it was just a monolithic C program in those days, you had to recompile the OS to insert a new driver). So NT was a systems programmer's dream. Today, Linux has most of these features, but NT deserves a nod of respect from those of us who remember how backwards UNIX was when NT came out.

British computing pioneer James Martin found dead in Bermuda sea

If he had invented the internet, he would have invented the internet.

Bill & Jobs' excellent adventure: Steve's tech looked better than mine

Re: Windows Design After Gates

Our group at MS Research had a former Apple designer, and I remember she thought Win95 was rather nice. But generally even inside Microsoft we all thought Apple did better design (but not such great software engineering). Buying an Apple product was like buying a Volvo, buying a Windows product was like buying a Ford pickup truck. Each has its advantages, if you want to look affluent and cool, or you want to get work done.

As for tablets, I worked for a while in the eBooks project (I'm one of the inventors of ClearType, check the patents if you don't believe me). I don't know if the tablets would have failed due to their design, the group did spent a fortune doing readability and font research. But the telling fact is that higher executives chickened out and cancelled the project before it ever had a chance.

Rocket boffinry in pictures: Gulp the Devil's venom and light a match

Re: With a little help from my freinds

It's not accurate to say the US rocket program was based on von Braun. The V-2 was a fascinating rocket, because of its large size, but it was not a new concept. In the mid 1930s, Goddard was launching liquid-fuel rockets with gyro guidance, the Russians built small rockets and the BI-1 rocket plane, there was a lot of experimentation.

After the war, the US has three rocket programs. Von Braun's people worked for the Army and built the Redstone, a modernized version of the V-2. The Navy has a program that began with RMI, Curtiss-Wright and Goddard, building JATO engines during the war and the Viking and Vanguard rockets in the 1950s. The Air Force contracted with its partners in the aviation industry to build the first long-range intercontinental rockets and cruise missiles (Navaho, Atlas, etc), which bore little resemblance to the German work.

It's not that the Germans didn't do a brilliant job with the V-2, it just was not unique knowledge or beyond the understanding of other engineers. It's become a cliché to talk about "our Germans and their Germans", but that is a naïve pictures of the history of rocketry in the 1950s and afterwards.

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

Re: Fuels

LOX/Ethanol. The V-2 engine was not very well cooled, so they had to use dilute alcohol (75%) and low chamber pressure. The Soviets got that back up to 90% ethanol and doubled the thrust of the engine for their R-5 rocket, by doing a lot of tinkering with the cooling. The fuel traveled around a spiral of pipes outside the thick steel walls of the combustion chamber, but that was insufficient. So they borrowed a trick from Goddard (who was actually being spied on by the Germans), and sprayed fuel onto the inside of the chamber.

The V-2 was a fascinating rocket, because it was an order of magnitude bigger than previous ones. You can debate whether rocketry really starts there, because it didn't have any new conceptual ideas. People had build liquid fuel rockets, used gyro stabilization, etc in America, Russia and probably a few other places. Tsiolkovsky in Russia first proposed space rockets using liquid fuel, and Goddard built the first one, Glushko in Russia had the best engines, but they were much smaller than what the V-2 needed.

Re: "bell x1" BAH!

The X-1 was a rocket powered plane, not a turbojet. But like the M52, it had two wings and was pointy on one end, so I can understand your confusion.

OpenSUSE 12.3: Proof not all Linux PCs are Um Bongo-grade bonkers

I get the feeling Win8 is trying to minimize UI computation. Do they think only ARM processors are going to exist in the future? It's just odd, because of those processors will eventually have some muscle. As one of the inventors of Cleartype, it's a bit annoying if they are abandoning it.

Squillionaire space tourist offers oldsters a holiday to Mars

Send Bart

Can we sent Bart Sibrel to Mars? "I'm in a television studio! This is fake!"

Every single Internet Explorer at risk of drive-by hacks until Patch Tuesday

Two Statements

1. IE kinda sucks. Probably true.

2. Other browsers are flawlessly programmed, totally secure, and not in need of the same intensive testing and patching. Probably false.

World's 'most green' supercomputer in red-hot battle between Intel, Nvidia

Re: Now approaching ludicrous processing speed, Captain!

The issue is operations per second per watt. How much electricity do you consume to perform a computation, is the question. ARM doesn't use much power, because it's not very powerful. They're trying to solve partial differential equations, not play Angry Birds.

OS/2 a quarter century on: Why IBM lost out and how Microsoft won

IBM, UBM, We all bm for IBM

IBM might have been a "powerhouse" of a corporation, but nobody thought they were software development wizards. Read "The Mythical Man Month". They were famous for bloated contorted systems. Having used their so-called timesharing system at Caltech, I can personally testifiy to how utterly horrible it was -- worse than UNIVAC exec, worse than DEC's tops20 or RT11, certainly worse than UNIX. You just can't imagine how backwards IBM was in its thinking...virtual card decks and job control language. They couldn't have done OS/2 without help from Microsoft.

IBM's strength was marketing and customer support. If you had money coming out of your ears, you hired IBM to build and run your computer center. Their support contracts were legendary. I know one case where a university's computer center burned down (U. Toronto I think), and within 24 hours IBM had a mobile center housed in trucks up and running in the parking lot. But the glorification of OS/2, that's just funny. Remember, it was not the flakey consumer Win95 that Microsoft brought out to compete with OS/2, it was Dave Cutler's NT operating system. That's what freaked out IBM, and caused one of their VPs to say he wanted to put an ice pick in BIll Gates' head.

Also, nobody was trying to write a "UNIX killer" back then. UNIX was something that ran on $50,000 workstations or $500,000 minicomputers, at universities flush with grant money. It wasn't a threatening personal computer operating system in the late 1980s.

Ten technology FAILS

Re: Bob...

I was in MS Research when Bob was still being developed. Supposedly, billg was given a demo, and after a few minutes he said, "Get that f****** clown off my screen". The hungarian prefix for the active agent object was subsequently changed to tfc.

How Nokia managed to drive its in-house Linux train off the rails

Academic UI Theories

Another funny example is the Nass & Reeves theory that Microsoft got suckered into. That was the basis for projects like "Bob" and their hated paperclip character. During one demo to billg, he burst out "Get that ****ing clown off my screen!". After that, the agent objects were given the hungarian prefix tfc, which indicated how the developers felt about the idea.

Microsoft leads from behind on Windows 8

Re: Hmm

I hear nothing but horror stories about the fragility of Linux from my friends at Amazon. On my workstation PC with ECC memory, neither XP nor Win7 has ever blue screened. I reboot my system a couple times a month, usually just when an update requires it (and yes I know Linux likes to hot-slide DLLs into a running system without rebooting, but don't assume that is a safe practice). There was a study done about ten years ago that showed that 50% of windows crashes were caused by parity errors in memory hardware. Does Linux just ignore or not detect memory errors?

XP was a version of NT, not a version of Windows 9x like ME. It was meant to merge all the functionality of NT and 9x into one system, and the technical challenge was that 9x was very permissive with apps and games. XP had to be "apps compatable", while maintaining the safer, more formal system interface of NT.

Google to rent Chromebooks for $30 per month

Chromebrick

For about few cents, you can buy a brick and just pretend the net connection is down.

Windows Server 2012: Smarter, stronger, frustrating

The NT microkernel architecture was rejected very early. It was going to support Win16, Win32 and even POSIX, but no such system was ever released. NT and even DOS/Windows 9X were still much more modular than UNIX. Microsoft used DLL's, COM interfaces and device-driver interfaces (DDI) long before UNIX had them. Even more complex technology was developed later to support extensible GUI interfaces (linking and embedding, Visual Basic and such stuff). Microsoft did this to allow them to update small parts of the OS instead of shipping a whole OS release to their customers everytime.

I remember installing device drivers on my SUN workstation in the late 1980s, and you had to edit the interrupt vector tables and recompile the kernel, because at that point in time UNIX was still just a giant monolithic C program. NT was much more advanced when it came out in 1989 -- it supported threads and concurrency much better than UNIX, it had async I/O and events and light-weight coroutines (fibers), I/O completion ports, etc. These features were more or less added to Linux much later on (I've heard async I/O in Linux is pretty dodgy).

Windows Phone 8: What Nokia and Microsoft must do

Re: OpenGL

They do need to support OpenGL. There's a long weird history that Microsoft needs to forget and move on. OpenGL was not doing well in the late 1990s, because SGI was holding it to a model based on their hardware's functionality, functionality that could not scale up to what we see on PC games today. Direct3D (which was not just designed by MS, but also nVidia and ATI) was a much needed innovation with its vertex and pixel shaders and triangle meshes. Immediately, the hardware vendors added all the Direct3D functionality to OpenGL, via its extension mechanism. Probably both Microsoft and SGI were annoyed by this, but today OpenGL and Direct3D essentially do the same things. So it was never really the lock-in that Microsoft might have hoped for.

Has cash corrupted open source?

Mailer Science

OSI was not successful, it was an academic charlie foxtrot. It's why a lot of the industry is so wary of W3C, because folks know how much damage an unfettered international standards committee can do. We evalutated parts of OSI at Bell Labs in the 1980s, the red book and blue book versions. TP4 was horrifically inefficient. One implementation took longer to negotiate a packet transmission than the connection-time-out period of TCP. The first two full implementations of the X.400 in Europe couldn't even send email to each other, because the groups had chosen such different data format options, both totally in agreement with the sprawling specification. At Bell Labs, we used the phrase "mailer science", as a derogitory term for this kind of badly engineered over-designed system. The net effect of this standards committe circle jerk was that a cabal of contractors and universities got a gravy train of publications and grant money, while Europe and Japan delayed joining the internet for several years -- think about the opportunity cost of that.

If there is one lesson to take away from the OSI debacle, it is never, ever, let the ITU have control of the internet. America clearly has too much control now, but just keep the corrupt, inept UN committees away from it, or everyone will be sorry.

Red alert! Google assembles crack team to AVOID privacy gaffes

Penetration Engineers

Microsoft hires Russian hackers, calling them "penetration engineers". That's gotta look good on your resume.

PayPal co-founder sells out of foundering Facebook at VAST profit

Foundering?

Facebook's product is an audience for advertising, which is also how Google makes a lot of its money. Is Google foundering? It is not at all obvious that something is fundmentally wrong, except that the stock market hasn't figured out what its share price should be.

Privacy is an important concern, but at least FB gathers information voluntarily, from the user entering information and clicking "like" on various items. This as opposed to the giant surveillance machine that is Google, monitoring web searches, what videos you watch on youtube, scraping your email.

FB faces two big technological problems. First is the technology of advertising, which is surprisingly complex. There is demographic analysis, even real-time actions for ad space when you visit some pages. The only alternative I see is an option to pay for an ad-free service. Experience with mobile apps suggests that only about 1 in 1000 users will chose to pay. However, you can easily make 1000x as much money by charging someone $10 a month -- the revenue from advertising is measured in fractional cents.

The other technological problem for Facebook has been growth. People wonder why FB isn't adding fancy new features or doing all the things that G+ tried, but they are failing to comprehend the engineering challenge of scaling up data centers and software by orders of magnetude, to handing their ridiculous growth. Now that things seem to be settling down, I hope we will see FB turn their attention to making more improvements.

Wintel takes kicking from Apple, market share at all-time low

PCs vs iPads

It's not really valid to say that pad sales equals a loss of PC sales. They are somewhat different devices, and it's not a zero sum game.

TryStack pits ARM against Xeon in the cloud

How many android phones does it take to equal an 8-core Ivy Bridge chip?

How did a smart company like Intel, with the best design and fabrication technology in the world, let a ho-hum processor like ARM threaten them? Their failure to anticipate the mobile device industry is an epic fail, Microsoft-like.

Google makes Opera bloggers an offer they can't refuse: Use Chrome

IE 9 too?

I've seen features (like image search) go dark for IE 9 within the last week. Have other's noticed this? As their browser climbs to the top, will Google snuff out its competition by making search and youtube only usuable by chrome?

Millionaire Ubuntu space nerd Shuttleworth live on The Reg

Alternatives

Windows 7

Microsoft: Don't overclock Windows 8 unless you like our new BSOD

ECC

There have been a number of reports within Microsoft on the cause of crashes. 50% are due to hardware memory errors, which is why servers use ECC ram (error-correcting coded). I like to build my own PCs, and definitely quality matters. Supermicro or Intel motherboards are a good idea too.

On a system with ECC and decent parts, like my last three machines, I have literally never seen a blue screen crash. My windows 7 machine runs for weeks, until some kind of undate requires me to reboot it.

Surface: Because Microsoft does so well making hardware?

Re: Xbox Loss?

XBox and XBox Live has been pretty successful. And it has dashed SONY's hopes of replacing the PC with their Playstation as the home hub device.

Vatican in pact with Microsoft to initiate world's youths into Office

phone transcript

"911. What's your emergency?"

"Someone bought Microsoft Office instead of Open Office!"

"Sir, this line is for real emergencies only."

Microsoft's FDS data-sorter crushes Hadoop

Jim Gray

Jim didn't work on DEC's servers, he was a research scientist known for expertise in data base systems. One of the best technical writers ever, his book on Transaction Processing is one of the bibles of database design and theory. Jim worked at Tandom, IBM, DEC and Microsoft.

One of Jim's projects was Terraserver, the forerunner of Google Earth. Hosting complete satellite image coverage, his group had to buy military spy satellite images from Russia. He also worked with astronomers to develop a unifying database of sky survey images, which was only completed after his death (the World Wide Telescope).

Jim was a great guy, and a great scientist, and his disappearance at sea caused a lot of sadness. Ironically, there was a large effort to search for his boat using online satellite images.

Amazon takes on Microsoft Azure head on

EC2 vs Azure

Amazon is dominating the cloud computing market. One place they cannot compete with Microsoft is in developing their own sophisticated software services, like MS Dynamics. And of course they are tying Azure services in with Win8.

Azure itself is pretty cool OS technology. Culter's team spent a year just studying the formal requirements for geographically distributed data centers. They merged technology from NT, Hypervisor and (I'm guessing) the SQLOS layer. The scalability tests I've seen are surprising, way better than Linux and even better than NT at multicore parallel performance.

What makes me skeptical about Microsoft is their executive management. I still would not be surprised if they fail. Their lasting impact may be the disporia of former Microsoft systems engineers, who are scattered throughout the industry today (for example, running EC2 at amazon). Systems engineering rules. You don't learn it in college, and it's not part of the open source culture, so if you want to built something big and complex, you gotta find those industrial experts.

Re: Azure vs AWS

You don't know what you're talking about.

IBM fires Power-powered Penguins at x86's weak spots

IBM once had 70% hardware market share

What is this new devilry? Something from Microsoft?

No. It is IBM, a demon of the ancient world.

This foe is beyond any of you...run!

Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER

Famous for being bad

BFE isn't really the worst movie or even the worst sci-fi movie. But it has become the most famous-for-being-bad movie, which is why it always wins these contests. Same thing just happened on io9. Still...it is kinda bad.

Greenpeace calls out cloud names on green claims

Why do we care what Greenpeace thinks?

Greenpeace: misanthropic, anti-growth, anti-technology, dogmatic, puritanical, zealous, upper-middle-class-white, romanitic pasturalists.

Teens break up with Facebook

Re: Anecdotal

I think Google+ has different data-mining advantages. Facebook gets information you explicitly decide to enter by clicking Like. Google gathers data by monitoring your activity, what youtube videos you watch, browser search strings, URL strings (if you use Chrome), scraping gmail text, etc. It's probably more complex for Google to analyze its data, but it has the advantage that much of their data is aquired involuntarily, from all users regardless of what they "like".

Vote now for the WORST movie EVER

Battlefield Earth meme

The problem is that Battlefield Earth is so famous for being bad, it always wins thsee polls, even if it is nowhere near the worst movie on the list.