Laptops can be crashed by Janet Jackson song, Microsoft says
Josie Ensor WASHINGTON
JANET JACKSON'S hit Rhythm Nation has the power to crash laptops - even
those it is not playing on.
A Microsoft engineer said a technical flaw could be activated by a
specific frequency in the 1989 song, much like some opera singers having
the power to break glass.
Raymond Chen, the company's principal software engineer, said another
unnamed "major computer manufacturer" had found some of its computers
were crashing when trying to play Rhythm Nation. He said playing the
song on one laptop could even crash another computer nearby as it could
also be affected by the frequency.
Mr 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 judgment.
"It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant
frequencies for the model of 5400rpm laptop hard drives that they and
other manufacturers used."
Because sounds are simply acoustic waves, there is a wavelength or
frequency for each material that can create the most vibration, known as
the medium's resonant frequency. The Mitre Corporation, a nonprofit
group that focuses on cyber security, found that frequency was in the
Janet Jackson music video.
Mitre described the issue as a security vulnerability which could allow
an attacker to force the system to crash using the audio signal from the
Rhythm Nation video.
Even stranger, Mr Chen found it did not even have to be the laptop that
the music video was playing on. Simply playing the music video on one
laptop could cause another close by to crash.
"One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video
also crashed some of their competitors' laptops," he said.
"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. (© Telegraph
Media Group Ltd 2022)
'Playing the music video on one laptop caused another sitting nearby to
crash'
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/janet-jackson-song-had-power-to-crash-laptops-microsoft-reveals-41923533.html
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