This isn't as much of a rant as the story of my worst abuse of computer knowledge.

This happened a couple years ago. When I was in high school, I had this friend/enemy relationship with this guy, lets call him Thomas. He loved to pull pranks on people. He had a similar firend/enemy relationship with my brother, and after one prank, my brother decided to get revenge. And by revenge, he meant asking me to make a virus.

I knew the guy, and I agreed. We thought about what type of virus we could make that would be funny, and not too damaging. We decided on a program that would play annoying sound effects every few minutes. Short enough to be noticable, long enough that Thomas would give up and not try to investigate.

I won't bore you with the details of the program. It was a very simple C app, very small, named "Counter-Strike-Global-Offence-Free-Download-Totally-Legit.exe". It was clearly visible in task manager, but since it was so small and barely used CPU or RAM it would stay near the bottom. I tried loading a custom sound effect, but it turned out the windows default "invalid sound effect" was much more annoying than any custom sound I could find.

The "Infecting" portion consisted of moving the .exe to the start menu startup folder while Thomas left his laptop unattended. My brother handled this part.

I unfortunaly left the country soon after and never actually saw the effect the program had on Thomas. I assumed my brothers laughing would give it away rather fast and he could simply remove it from his startup folder. However, my brother told me he still complained about it for months, before finally bringing the laptop to a repair center that found the totally legit CS:GO exe. My brother ended up telling him soon after, but this was still the best prank I ever pulled.