The software finally launched, but the "Extra Quality" claim was a cruel joke. The interface was riddled with strange, unremovable watermarks of a dancing cat, and every time he placed a capacitor, his computer’s cooling fan began to sound like a jet engine. Unbeknownst to Alex, the "crack" had turned his laptop into a silent soldier in a global botnet, mining cryptocurrency for a stranger in another hemisphere [3, 4].