Another disaster for Internet Brands: Wikimedia seeks declaratory relief

After the Xenforo debacle Internet Brands obviously is actively looking for new problems: Wikimedia sues Internet Brands.

Read the full story at http://blog.wikimedia.org/ and https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:WMF_complaint_for_declaratory_judgement_September_2012.pdf

Maybe CEO Robert N. Brisco should tell his team to provide better services to his customers (both vBulletin and commnities) than keeping lawyers busy.

A day to remember: Nokia finally let Qt go

If you don’t know Qt: it is a remarkable piece of software that enables software developers to write a single programm and deploy it on the most important platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) giving the developer the ultimate freedom.

In 2008 Nokia bought Qt from Trolltech but in 2011 Nokia started a partnership with Microsoft and they hope to become #1 in the cell phone market again – maybe they still haven’t heard about Iphone and Android.

Now CEO Elrop finally recognized that he can’t be in bed with Microsoft and develop a cross platform application framework and sold Qt. Wow. It took you so long?

Bad for Nokia but good for all of us. We need choices, not monopoly.

Xenforo vs. vBulletin – 1:0

Many forum admins follow the neverending saga about the fight vBulletin (Internet Brands) vs. Xenforo, a competing forum software. vBulletin has lost many customers due to

  • broken promises
  • vBulletin becoming outdated software really fast
  • many problems with software quality

As vb/IB obviously weren’t able to compete on quality they even started a baseless law suit against Xenforo and are trying to suck money out of the small company (see David vs. Goliath).

Now this whole drama has finally become a farce: one of Internet Brands sites, classadrivers.com, was using smilies from a Xenforo site and was even hotlinking to them! When the owner of the site noticed it, he changed the smilies on his site to some nice graphics and suddenly, all the posts on the Classadrivers forum showed this:

Internet Brand vs. Xenforo

How funny is that?

It took some time for the Internet Brand “webmasters” to realize that something strange is going on and they took the whole site down:

maintenance

Internet Brands at its best.

Link to thread on Xenforo

Xenforo down because of expired domain?

The domain xenforo.com is down and it seems because it expired:

Creation date: 04 Jun 2010 07:42:00
Expiration date: 04 Jun 2012 02:42:00

See yourself at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/xenforo.com

Still no word about this from Kier Darby, Mike Sullivan or Ashley Busby, the owners of the software company. Have they simply forgotten to renew their business domain??? A bit strange for a business. Have Internet Brands finally reached their goal, destroying the former forum market leader Vbulletin and drag Xenforo down, too?

Until this is resolved, you can access the Xenforo site by editing your hosts file (for Windows 7 located at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc – you need admin rights to edit this file) and add the following line “184.173.238.122 xenforo.com”.

Update: the domain now has been renewed: “Expiration date: 04 Jun 2013”

Kaspersky and false positives with Google Ads

Remember 2010, when the anti virus software Kaspersky annoyed it’s users with false positives with Google ads? Obviously now it’s time again for them to think all Google ads are evil. On nearly all sites I visit (major sites too) I have to confirm a message box stating that they have blocked a virus. I hope they update their database fast.