As our students know, Chess Institute of Canada has been using Lichess for online teaching and chess play for over two years, since the pandemic forced us to move our activities online.

This includes not only our popular weekly online classes, appropriate to children of all ages, but our upcoming summer camps and frequent online tournaments.

We love Lichess! It is free to use, its interface is elegant, it has great teaching tools, and CIC instructors have been developing a robust new curriculum using Lichess for the past two years, focused on teaching life skills to our students through the great game of chess.

Even today, as we increasingly return to teaching in person, we continue to use Lichess every day.

It was therefore alarming to learn today that computer hackers broke into Lichess and have released its source code to the world!

Lichess programmers assure its users that no personal information was breached in the attack. However, the possibility of the source code being used to develop a potentially infinite number of other chess and chess-related sites is either a blessing or a curse for the world of online board game play.