Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation music video of 1989 has officially been declared a security vulnerability as it freezes some models of hard drives on older computers. Assigned CVE-2022-38392, the vulnerability we are talking about is a Denial of Service (DoS), specifically a side-channel attack that causes hard drives of some laptop PCs from 2005 to malfunction and crash. And, it's to do with a physical phenomenon known as resonance that might take you back to your high school days.

A broken record, and "tape stop" are all too familiar terms for DJs and music enthusiasts, but a song crashing hard disks you say? Now that would make anyone glare. In a succinct writeup, Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen has revealed this week why playing a certain music video, back in the day, would crash some laptops.

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 judgement.

One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors' laptops.

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!

What's going on?

It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

And I'm sure they put a digital version of a "Do not remove" sticker on that audio filter. (Though I'm worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it's there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)

And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.