Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music

It sounds like something out of an urban legend, that some Windows XP-era laptops can be forced to crash when exposed to Janet Jackson's 1989 hit " Rhythm Nation".

The vulnerability has been issued an official CVE ID by The Mitre Corporation and Microsoft Software Engineer Raymond Chen is standing by the story.

It can affect not just the laptop playing the song, but also the adjacent laptops from other PC companies, according to Chen. The hard drive model at issue was manufactured by an unnamed manufacturer and it would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used the same frequencies that the drives used.

The age of the laptops involved and a lack of specificity about the hard drives will make it difficult for anyone to recreate this problem. The CVE entry mentions a hard drive that was shipped with laptop PCs in 2005 and links to a post by Chen. After almost two decades, it's more likely that most of the laptop hard drives are dead.

At the time, the issue was partially solved by the PC manufacturer. The problem was solved by adding a custom filter to the audio line up. If the laptop was exposed to another device playing the song, the hard drives would crash. The decline in popularity of "Rhythm Nation" didn't make it a widespread problem.

The sound frequencies can interfere with the operation of spinning hard drives, as demonstrated in this popular old video of a man screaming at a server rack. We can definitely say that strange things have happened even if we can't confirm it.