Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ crashed some Windows laptops for years
Wes Davis is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.
Longtime Verge readers might recall the unusual story of how the music video for a Janet Jackson song, “Rhythm Nation,” could cause certain Windows laptops to crash just by being around when it’s playing. Now, in a blog post spotted by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has revealed that a filter created to deal with the problem stuck around until “at least Windows 7.”
For those not familiar: in 2022, Chen wrote a pair of posts relaying a Microsoft colleague’s story about how an unnamed “major computer manufacturer” had to create a custom filter for audio playback after finding that certain frequencies in the video resonated with its laptops’ hard drives. Unfiltered, the resonance could “disrupt the hard drive’s proper operation long enough for it to result in the operating system crashing.” The issue even got its own entry in the NIST National Vulnerability Database, which says it affected 5,400rpm hard drives for certain machines “in approximately 2005 and later.”
Chen, who says he was curious how long the filter in place, writes this week that he has since learned that after Microsoft introduced a new rule for Windows 7 saying that users must be able to disable all audio processing on their computers, a hardware vendor asked for an exception. Chen writes:
The vendor applied for an exception to this rule on the grounds that disabling their APO could result in physical damage to the computer. If it were possible to disable their APO, word would get out that “You can get heavier bass if you go through these steps,” and of course you want more bass, right? I mean, who doesn’t want more bass? So people would uncheck the box and enjoy richer bass for a while, and then at some point in the future, the computer would crash mysteriously or (worse) produce incorrect results.
Is that rule still in place to this day? When a commenter asked a question along those lines below Chen’s post, Chen replied, “All I know is that it was there in the Windows 7 era. I don’t know if it’s still there.”
Regardless, the industry has moved on from spinning disk hard drives; whether a modern computer has the rule in place or not, chances are good that it’s safe to listen to “Rhythm Nation” around it, these days. So, here it is:
