It’s a 15-year-old affair that’s resurfacing. A video clip of Janet Jackson then crashed the PC hard drive under Windows XP. In a blog note, a Microsoft engineer tells the anecdote and the reasons for this bug.
It is an original story to say the least. A Microsoft developer, Raymond Chen, told a anecdote reported by a colleague of his from Windows XP product support released in 2001. “A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s song ‘Rhythm Nation’ caused certain laptop models to crash . Released on October 23, 1989, the title which is part of the album Rhythm Nation 1814 is then a success at the time: in the United States, it reached second place on the Billboard Hot 100 and ranked at the top of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Dance Club Songs chart. It also broke into the top 40 on several singles charts around the world. Finally, the title received several awards.
But around 2005, the tube was talked regarding once more for other reasons: computers crashed when they listened to this video clip. During the investigation, the manufacturer understands that it also causes breakdowns in some of its competitors. The story doesn’t end there, and the weirdest part of this anecdote is what follows. “Playing the clip on a laptop PC caused another nearby laptop to crash, even though it wasn’t playing the clip! “.
Certain frequencies of the title in question
After this discovery that might be described as mystical, Raymond Chen explains the reasons for this gigantic bug. “It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies of the 5400 rpm laptop hard drive model used by the manufacturer and others.” The manufacturer then worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio module that detects and removes the offending frequencies during audio playback.
Even though the story is now in the past – support for Windows XP having been dropped in 2014 – the fact remains that a patch has been developed. bearing the name of CVE-2022-38392, This vulnerability is described as follows: “A type of 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with portable PCs around 2005, allows attackers who are physically nearby to cause a denial of service (malfunction of the device and system failure) via a resonant frequency attack with the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video”.
