Janet Jackson's song can crash old laptops

A clip of a song by Janet Jackson released in 1989 gave problems to the Microsoft and other legacy PC makers (which at the time were super current) in 2005. The news was shared by Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft, Raymond Chen, and is curious to say the least.

The models were hit by a problem that goes by the name of natural frequency and it was resolved only by launching a filter to modify the clip's audio. Get the whole story right now.

The problem with Janet Jackson's music

The year was 2005 and the Microsoft was having problems with a clip that is now 33 years old. The specific release is that of Rhythm Nation, which, according to Microsoft, had such a high frequency that it caused conflicts on older hard drives that were running Windows XP. Remember (don't do this on older machines):

This happened for a reason: according to Chen, the clip was emitting natural frequencies to a machine that had old HDDs of 5.400 rpm (rotations per minute). In practice, the hard drive vibrated at such a high frequency that the operating system simply did not work anymore. Sounds simple, but this was a problem that caused a lot of headache for the Microsoft.

The music contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5.400 rpm model of laptop hard drives they and other manufacturers used.

Raymond Chen, Chief Software Engineer at Microsoft

What is natural frequency?

To understand the age-old problem of music from Janet Jackson on old laptops, one has to get into the engineering field. Natural frequency of vibration is an inherent characteristic of all objects, and depends on factors such as the geometry and material of each object.

When the object is hit by a wave frequency (such as the sound frequency of a song) identical to its natural frequency, the phenomenon of resonance occurs, in which the object begins to vibrate by itself, without the application of a mechanical force. One way to avoid resonance is to change the object's natural frequency, either by using energy-absorbing materials or by modifying the object's mass.

Troubleshooting old HDs

To prevent laptops from crashing and all work from being lost, it was necessary for the Microsoft create a custom filter in pipeline audio that avoided the problem. According to the engineer, the novelty was able to detect and remove the frequencies responsible for breaking the models.

The fault was named vulnerability CVE-2022-38392 and nowadays it is no longer considered a threat; that is, owners of older PCs can play the clip without any problems. Can you imagine what would happen if a video released 33 years ago still had a problem with the memories we use in computers?

In 2005, did you ever have a problem like this? tell us Comment!

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Sources: Z l The Next Web