Diablo III Server Emulator Gaining Traction

Given the amount of data that the game pulls from Blizzard's servers, I would think it will be a very long time - if ever - before the community manages to construct an offline version of Diablo III that even partially resembles the game we're playing online now. But that hasn't stopped the cracking groups out there from at least trying, and apparently the beta version of one such piece of server emulation software is causing some excitement over in China. From Kotaku's article:
The crack in question, released by the notorious game hacking group Skidrow is basically a server emulator for Diablo III. The server emulator would allow the game to think that it was "connected" to Blizzards server, thus allowing the player to play Diablo III offline. Currently the crack is still in its beta stage but a working torrent has been released.

Perhaps due to the overwhelming popularity of Blizzard games in China, as of this writing, Tencent and People's Daily have highlighted story on their websites. The writers for the stories went even as far as to say, "we hope that SK group can have this crack working 100 percent, so that we can play Diablo III before there is an official operator."

The articles also ask potential users of the crack to bear with the problems as the crack is only in beta. "We, as the guinea pigs, will have to be prepared for bugs but at least we can play offline."