🎵 2022-08-17 21:59:57 – Paris/France.
While it's normal for friends to judge our musical tastes and take away your auxiliary privileges, our devices usually don't complain about our listening habits (even if we repeatedly ask them to play a song that most humans would find unbearable). However, according to a story shared by Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Raymond Chen on his blog The old new thingsome Windows XP-era laptops ended up objecting to Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" music video because it contained audio that crashed their hard drives.
According to Chen, an unnamed "big computer maker" found that some of their computers crashed while trying to play the song, and playing the song on a laptop might even crash another nearby computer that was only busy with it. his own business. The manufacturer has also discovered that the problem occurs on laptops from other companies as well.
Chen says the company eventually discovered the song contained sound that resonated with a specific model of laptop hard drive. In other words, it was like a less destructive version of when someone played a specific sound to smash a wine glass — the sound waves emitted from the computer speakers while the song was playing. vibrate its hard drive, crashing the computer. According to the story, the manufacturer came up with a simple, if inelegant, solution to the problem: making their computers simply not play that specific frequency.
The story is, unfortunately, relatively light on details. Chen does not say which laptops or hard drives were affected, and there is no video of a laptop crashing while the song is playing. Still, it's a fun anecdote about the extremely weird things physics can do to our computers, and the process of nailing down what appears to be a completely random bug.
While I can imagine troubleshooting this problem must have been a particular nightmare, it's no secret that hard drives are extremely susceptible to vibrations of all types. Chen links to a 2008 video that shows data center engineers disrupting hard drives by yelling at them, and in 2017 security researcher Alfredo Ortega presented a program that deliberately jams hard drives by emitting a sound at their resonant frequency. The program even warns that it could physically damage the drive – resonant frequencies can actually be extremely destructive under the wrong circumstances. They contributed to the collapse of the suspension bridges and the Stuxnet virus would have tried to take advantage of this to destroy the centrifuges.
Ortega and other security researchers have also demonstrated how hard drives can be used as rudimentary microphones to eavesdrop on people's conversations, thanks to the fact that they react to sound. One of the examples included in a lecture demonstrating the effect was to play an Iron Maiden song on a hard drive and see if Shazam could identify it. The experiment apparently worked, although the presenter does not mention whether he crashed the player.
PS: Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Paweł Zadrożniak, the person who creates music using old computer components, including hard drives, has covered "Rhythm Nation". But Zadrożniak should definitely do it now because the irony would be delicious.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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