Old Laptop Hard Drives Will Allegedly Crash When Exposed To Janet Jackson Music

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It sounds like something out of an urban legend: Some Windows XP-era laptops using 5400 RPM spinning hard drives can allegedly be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit "Rhythm Nation." But Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen stands by the story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation, lending it more credibility. According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by "a major computer manufacturer," and it can affect not just the laptop playing the song but adjacent laptops from other PC companies as well. The specific hard drive model at issue -- again from an unnamed manufacturer -- would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation. Anyone trying to independently recreate this problem will face several obstacles, including the age of the laptops involved and a total lack of specificity about the hard drives or computer models. The CVE entry mentions "a certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with laptop PCs in approximately 2005" and links back to Chen's post as a primary source. And while some Windows XP-era laptop hard drives may still be kicking out there somewhere, after almost two decades, it's more likely that most of them have died of natural causes. The PC manufacturer was able to partially resolve the issue "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playbanck," says Chen. However, these HDDs would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.