A song by Janet Jackson could crash some laptops in the days of Windows XP. Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen reported on the incident on Wednesday and claimed to have heard the story from a colleague in Windows XP product support. According to the blog post, Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation” could disrupt a 5400 RPM laptop hard drive model used in various laptops.
Microsoft found out about the problem when a laptop manufacturer informed the company’s Windows team about the mysterious error. Initially, the company thought it had something to do with Rhythm Nation’s music video being played on laptops. But what made the problem even weirder was that the Rhythm Nation clip also crashed Windows laptops owned by the manufacturer’s competitors.
Janet Jackson’s 1989 music video “Rhythm Nation” was identified as a cybersecurity vulnerability after Microsoft reported it could crash old laptops.
A colleague of mine shared a story about Windows XP product support, said Raymond Chen. The story describes how a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” music video would crash certain laptop models.
Further investigations revealed that machines from several manufacturers also crashed. Sometimes playing the video on one laptop would crash on another nearby laptop.
The investigation revealed that all of the failed laptops used the same 5400 RPM hard drive.
The song turned out to contain one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400 RPM model of laptop hard drives they and other manufacturers use,” Chen wrote.
The manufacturer that found the problem apparently inserted a custom filter into the audio pipeline to detect and remove the interfering frequencies when playing audio. Of course, with modern machines, this problem is rather anecdotal. Also, almost nobody listens to Janet Jackson anymore (you? Really?).
The risk of sonic vibration interfering with a hard drive is certainly surprising. But the problem has actually been known in computer circles for years. In his blog post, Chen linked to a 2008 video about how yelling at storage drives in a data center can cause increased latency.
Sent by Raymond Chen
A colleague of mine shared a story about Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” music video was causing certain laptop models to crash. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the lab they had to set up to study this problem.
A discovery during the investigation was that playing the video clip also crashed some competitors’ laptops.
And then they discovered something extremely strange*: playing the video clip on one laptop caused a nearby laptop to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video*!
What happened ?
The song turned out to contain one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400 RPM model of laptop hard drives they and other manufacturers used.
The manufacturer circumvented the problem by inserting a custom filter into the audio pipeline that detected and removed the interfering frequencies during audio playback.
And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “do not delete” sticker on this audio filter. (Although I’m afraid that in the many years since the workaround was added, no one remembers why it was there. Hopefully their laptops no longer carry this audio filter to protect against damage to a hard drive model they no longer use).
And, of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can do without a reference to the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Miter Corporation saw fit to add it to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Registry – the definitive list of cybersecurity vulnerabilities we all need to know about.
It is listed as CVE-2022-38392 and has already been confirmed by security vendor Tenable.
Although the bug looks weird, side-channel attacks are a real threat. Israeli researcher Mordechai Guri has found ways to attack computers, including causing memory to emit radiation in the same bands used by Wi-Fi and encoding information in those emissions.
Laptop owners with old, slow hard drives should therefore be very careful when listening to Janet Jackson tunes while working – that’s why we didn’t include a link to Rhythm Nation in this story (phew, saved!!!!) .
Source: microsoft, Windows developer documentationCVE-2022-38392, durable
And you?
how do you read it
Are you surprised to know that audio frequencies can crash computers?
Do you hear Janet Jackson?
Do you think this issue deserves to be recognized as a security vulnerability? Why ?
Have you ever heard a song that causes a similar problem?