“Rhythm Nation”, Janet Jackson’s hit, would cause serious disturbances in platter hard drives! Rest assured, the bug has been partially corrected, and then PCs with these hard drives are no longer running the streets.
It sounds like an urban legend, and yet it can happen. Raymond Chen, software engineer at Microsoft, made an astonishing discovery: a song by Janet Jackson from 1989, ” Rhythm Nation crashes Windows XP-era PC hard drives. The piece, a hit at the time, indeed uses the same resonance frequencies as those of the hard disks in question.
Unlikely to happen today
The matter was taken very seriously, with the bug even having an official CVE ID (CVE-2022-38392). It was discovered by a major PC manufacturer, and it affects not only the computer the song is playing on, but surrounding computers as well!
The bug has since been partially corrected by the manufacturer in question, which added a custom filter to the computer’s audio pipeline: it is responsible for detecting and removing frequencies during file playback. The fix is incomplete, however: a hard drive may still be affected by the song if it’s played from another device.
However, the likelihood of your PC crashing due to ” Rhythm Nation is low. On the one hand, it is no longer widely listened to today. And then the problem affects only certain types of hard drives at 5,400 rpm, which were delivered in laptops running Windows XP dating from around 2005.
Obviously, if you still have such a computer still in use, beware of this song! Unfortunately, Raymond Chen does not specify the brand of the hard drive, nor that of the manufacturer, which makes it much more difficult to hunt down PCs that are potentially in danger.