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Longtime Verge readers may recall the unique story of how the music video for Janet Jackson's song, "Rhythm Nation," could cause some Windows computers to collapse just by being there when it was playing. According to a blog post noticed by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen claimed that a filter designed to address the issue remained in place until "at least Windows 7."
For those who are unfamiliar, in 2022, Chen authored a pair of blogs recounting a Microsoft colleague's anecdote of how an unidentified "major computer manufacturer" had to design a unique filter for audio playing after discovering that certain frequencies in the video reverberated with their laptops' hard drives. Unfiltered, the resonance might "disrupt the hard drive's proper operation long enough for it to result in the operating system crashing." The vulnerability even has its own record in the NIST National Vulnerability Database, which states that it affects 5,400rpm hard drives for specific PCs "in approximately 2005 and later."
Chen, who was interested how long the filter had been in place, writes this week that after Microsoft implemented a new rule for Windows 7 requiring users to be able to deactivate all audio processing on their systems, a hardware vendor requested an exemption. Chen wrote:
The vendor filed for an exemption to this regulation, claiming that deactivating their APO might cause physical harm to the machine. If it were feasible to disable their APO, news would spread that "You can get heavier bass if you go through these steps," and you obviously want more bass, right? I mean, who wouldn't want more bass? So folks would uncheck the button and enjoy fuller bass for a time, only to have the machine crash inexplicably or provide inaccurate results later.
Is that rule still in force today? When a reader posed a similar query underneath Chen's article, Chen responded, "All I know is that it was available in the Windows 7 timeframe. I'm not sure if it's still there.
Regardless, the industry has moved on from spinning disk hard drives; whether a current computer has the rule in place or not, it's probably safe to listen to "Rhythm Nation" around it these days. So, here it is.
