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4/24/02 - The Illinois Prairie State Achievement Examination started today with the ACT.

4/24/02 - As of right now Blizzard is set to release WarCraft III on June 26, 2002.

4/17/02 - Blizzard has filed a lawsuit against BnetD, which reads as follows:  Blizzard Entertainment confirmed today that it and its parent company Vivendi Universal Games have filed a lawsuit against members of the BNETD project as well as Internet Gateway, Inc., a St. Louis-based Internet service provider. The lawsuit centers on the creation, hosting and distribution of BNETD, a software program that incorporates Blizzard's copyrighted materials without authorization and enables pirated copies of Blizzard games to be played online.

The lawsuit, filed on April 5, 2002, alleges that members of the BNETD project violated copyright law by illegally copying portions of code from Blizzard's computer games. The BNETD software, which emulates Blizzard's free online gaming service, bypasses an authentication process designed to prevent the use of illegal copies of Blizzard games on the Internet. Contrary to BNETD's contentions, Blizzard states that it would have been impossible for a third party to recreate specific authentication code embedded in their games by analyzing or "packet sniffing" network traffic between a Blizzard game and Battle.net. Additionally, Blizzard contends that Internet Gateway violated copyright law by hosting BNETD and contributing to the copyright infringement of users playing pirated copies of Blizzard games.

"We always have been and will continue to be diligent in protecting our trademarks and copyrighted materials," said Michael Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder. "We are convinced that certain members of the BNETD project illegally copied parts of our code and bypassed the game's CD-Key authentication process. We further believe that emulators damage our efforts to prevent piracy, and they create safe havens for players using illegal copies of our products." Morhaime continued, "Our goal is to provide the best gaming experience for our users; piracy impedes our ability to do that and ultimately hurts the entire gaming community."

Blizzard Entertainment provides free and reliable online multiplayer gaming for its products over Battle.net, the company's exclusive online game network. Battle.net prevents the use of pirated games on its network by providing each user with a unique, alphanumeric CD-Key, which is included with legitimate retail versions of Blizzard games. BNETD enables multiplayer gaming without a valid CD-Key, which allows players to use illegal copies of Blizzard games on the Internet. In the lawsuit, Blizzard alleges that, in order to make the BNETD software work, certain programmers at BNETD copied Blizzard code relating to password and username authentication, and incorporated it into the BNETD server program.