Can someone explain what it is? I assume a new private server to host BW games?
https://www.shieldbattery.net/
I just don't understand what it is, nor it's point. I guess that because I am a newb?

Yeah it's basically a new server (along with other things) like iccup, but it claims to offer much more stability and other stuff for players.

There it is :

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/508993-shieldbattery-bw-revitalized-for-modern-mortals

It's a whole new interface too, with new features for SC (new screen resolutions, networking, Vista / Seven / W10 compatibility, auto match finding etc).

I believe UMS maps are not supported for now though.

A little more than that.

Essentially, it's an IRC with addons that allow you to host and view games for StarCraft. There is no need to actually have StarCraft running, it launches the game when necessary and you're directly in-game already. It takes battlenet and SC's UI completely out of the picture besides what you see once you're playing the map.

Currently maps are fixed and you cannot just host whatever you want, only what ShieldBattery has available.

So is this good or bad, considering the new changes being made from Blizzard? (I would assume since pre-patches are being made)

The guy who made this rewrote the entire network stack so it's pretty cool, should remove the need for portforwarding completely. Ideally the entire foreign community would shift to that and leave iccup and the bnet servers, once it's released.

Imagine the ultimate map-tester's dream where you can start up a game without having to wait for that 5 second countdown time.

I think jjf was doing something with that at some point

Yep, but SC does something at every tick (randomization seeding is the only physical thing I noticed) and they'd need to be combined with one in addition to checking that everyone else in the game is doing the same.

Can still use it while testing in single player: No Timer

Lol my antivirus stopped taht file from running.

I made it so I can vouch that it's clean

That's because the file is new/hasn't been spread much yet, so basically your anti virus cloud has never seen the file. So it could be a new virus trying to spread itself and the scanner has not yet received a pattern file from the server (because it's too new), so it does the safe thing and blocks it. If you are sure it's clean (which we are) you can unblock it and tell your scanner who will report that to the cloud and if enough people do it, it will probably soon be considered safe.

Honestly I'm thinking of just uninstalling my antivirus altogether. Lately my favourite one (Avast) has started pestering me with ads. I uninstalled and moved to Avira, only to find it does the same thing.

Are there any free antiviruses left that DON'T pester you with popups?

Are antiviruses even that useful anymore, or does Windows Defender do the job fine?

I just paid for Malware Bytes and haven't had an issue.