CSDN a major Chinese Community website for Software Developers has been shut down during the Olympics period

August 16th, 2008

CSDN (China Software Developer Network, www.csdn.net) is an important and popular community website in China for software developers / Techies / IT enthusiasts. It hosts many active IT forums, blogs, knowledge base articles, IT news and an IT job hunting service.

However the website has been inaccessible for the past few days. The website’s operators have yet to issue an official announcement explaining the outage – very strange for such a major and well known website. Reports in the Chinese Internet indicate that CSDN has been shut down by the government because it illegally hosted some Beijing Olympics videos and CSDN might possibly come back online only around the end of September, after the Olympics.

This case is illustrative of the tight control the government has over the Internet in China. Beijing has been very aggressive with enforcing Oympics trademarks in the past few months and probably also became very sensitive to unauthorized Olympics videos after a Korean TV station leaked a video online of a Olympics Opening Ceremony rehearsal.

This isn’t the first time the government has shut down a website – some months ago the Chinese video sharing site 56.com was shut down for a few weeks, probably because they needed to make changes to obtain the official “online video license” from the government. Many online forums are shut down during important Chinese government events, e.g. during every Com munist Party Congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSDN