19 Aug. (Portaltic/EP) –
The video clip of Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson it has the ability to crash some old laptops due to a computer glitch that triggers a certain resonant frequency contained in the song.
The vulnerability, which has already been collected as CVE-2022-38392affects laptops from around 2005 from different manufacturers, which are beginning to malfunction or stop working altogether when the Rhythm Nation video clip is played, both on them and on nearby equipment.
This discovery has been shared by the Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, who has told in the company blog A colleague’s experience with Windows XP product support. First, the video clip would crash the manufacturer’s equipment it was working for when played on it. When testing it on equipment from rival brands, the effect was repeated and even nearby laptops that were not reproducing it also crashed.
The investigation revealed that the 1989 song contained “one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400rpm model of portable hard drives” present on the affected laptops. The vulnerability log states that it “allows a denial of service to be caused.”
According to Chen, the solution that was found was add a filter on the audio channel that detected and removed offending frequencies during song playback.
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