Some Users In China Reporting They Are Able To Access Facebook, Despite Ban
A sign of a crack in the Great Chinese Firewall? Internet users in China today are reporting that they are able to access Facebook in the country: some say they can access the site through mobile Internet connections and iOS apps; others are reporting access using HTTPS connections on their computers.
The social network has been having problems in the country as far back as 2009, when the site was “punished” for allowing a Uighur activist to post details of an upcoming protest. Read more...
Objective-C, C#, D language: Winners in programming popularity
Objective-C, used for developing Apple iOS applications, climbs to No. 6 in the monthly Tiobe Programming Community index for most popular programming languages, after being ranked at number 8 a year ago. Also posting gains, C# rose to No. 4, a jump of two spots a year ago, while PHP dropped from No. 4 at this time last year to No. 5.
D, meanwhile, had been in the top 20 from 2007 until the middle of 2009 and was ranked 20 in the September report. Tiobe points to a Wikipedia reference about the release of a book entitled "The D Programming Language," by Andrei Alexandrescu, in June 2010, as a possible reason for the language's comeback. The D language is from Digital Mars and can be viewed as somewhat of a successor to C++, although C++ is still popular, said Paul Jansen, founder and chief community officer of Tiobe, which assesses software quality: "D is in fact a clean design of C++." Read more...