Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ crashed some Windows laptops for years
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Summary
In 2022, Microsoft revealed that certain music videos could potentially crash nearby laptops that ran Windows operating systems, due to the resonance of particular audio frequencies with the laptops’ hard drives.
A Microsoft blog post revealed this week that an exemption was granted to a major hardware manufacturer that built a filter to counter the issue, as the hard drive interference could physically damage the computers.
The exemption was allowed due to the issue dating back as far as Windows 7, and the vulnerability entry in the NIST National Vulnerability Database indicated it affected machines from 2005.
The blogger, Raymond Chen, confirmed that the rule around users being able to switch off audio processing was still in place in the era of Windows 7, but may since have been removed.
Regardless, current laptop models are unlikely to be impacted by the issue, as they do not use spinning hard drives to store data.