Microsoft principal software engineer, Raymond Chen, has identified Janet Jackson’s 1989 pop hit ‘Rhythm Nation’ as a cybersecurity vulnerability that could crash some laptop computers. The song is said to contain a sound that crashes the hard drives of old laptops.
According to Chen, an unnamed “major computer manufacturer” discovered that some of their computers were crashing when trying to play the song and playing the song on one laptop could even crash another computer nearby that was just minding its own business.
The manufacturer also discovered that the issue cropped up on other companies’ laptops as well.
What the Microsoft software engineer is saying
Announcing the discovery in a blog post, Chen said: “A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.”
“One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!” he added.
Why this is happening
Explaining the reason behind the crash, Chen said: “It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
“The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.”
“And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using,” he said.
Is this really true🤔???? Or else I want to see the quality of the video 😉