[HN Gopher] Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computer...
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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Author : montalbano
Score : 206 points
Date : 2025-12-27 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| etchalon wrote:
| Computers are so weird.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Analog devices pretending to be digital
| nntwozz wrote:
| Another reason to step away from spinning rust.
|
| Thank dog for SSDs
| functionmouse wrote:
| Spinning rust may be defeated by Janet Jackson, but your chip
| storage is defeated by just sitting undisturbed in a drawer or
| a closet for too long...
| mc32 wrote:
| Platters are not made of iron (or even steel) and neither is
| the surface, so I'm not sure why rust comes into the picture.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| The platters used to be coated with iron oxide as the
| magnetic coating.
|
| Modern ones use more exotic materials.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes but that was like 40 years ago. I think by now the
| phraseology should reflect reality after about forty years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| How many horsepower does your car have?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| We still talk about "bugs" (99+% of computer defects in
| the past 70+ years have not been caused by insects) and
| "AJAX" (long after most of these requests use JSON
| instead of XML).
| seanhandley wrote:
| "Phraseology" is subtly different.
|
| You mean "vocabulary", "terminology", possibly
| "nomenclature".
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Ironically, I only started hearing the term being used in
| the past decade, as a colloquial alternative to solid-
| state storage.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Technically, that magnetic spinning HDD can work even after
| decades if maintained safely (no dust, no extreme heat) and
| without stress, even if it is not switched on for years.
|
| In fact, if a magnetic HDD crashes, you may still recover some
| or all of the data by doing something hardcore, such as letting
| it sit for some hours in the freezer of your refrigerator, or
| immersing it in a bowl of rice overnight.
|
| However, SSDs (and other flash storage devices) need to be
| switched on once in few months, otherwise there's a chance that
| some data stored in them may be permanently lost, as some cells
| may loose their power.
|
| "As a reminder, an SSD's endurance rating is calculated based
| on how long it can store data if left unplugged after a certain
| amount of data has been written":
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...
| daymanstep wrote:
| HDDs also lose magnetic charge over time, about 1% per year.
| So you need to periodically spin up and rewrite the data
| every few years.
|
| CD drives however, can store data indefinitely without
| needing refreshing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| CD-R media is of limited shelf life as well though
| binarymax wrote:
| But the materials on the CD eventually break down,
| sometimes as soon as within 5 years. So you can look into
| MDisc, which purports 100 years...but only in theory since
| the tests are just approximations of what would actually
| happen.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Totally could be a defect in the lamination we don't find
| out for years yet
| iwontberude wrote:
| Having had drives which sat for many years and spun right
| back up without corruption makes me think 1% is too
| generous maybe 0.05% per year at most
| wtallis wrote:
| The claim you're responding to is that hard drives lose
| "magnetic charge" at a rate of 1% per year, not that bits
| get corrupted at a rate of 1% per year. The error
| correction in hard drives is far simpler and weaker than
| what's used in SSDs, but it does exist. So we should
| expect that there's a significant margin for data
| degradation before any observable data corruption begins.
| (This is true for SSDs, too; the first symptom of data
| degradation is reduced read performance as slower, more
| complex error correction methods kick in, then much later
| the host starts to actually get read errors or bad data.)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| The magnetic strength of particles on the disk can decay
| at 1% per year, but the drive won't have issues reading
| them until they fall below a threshold where they can no
| longer be read. It could take decades.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| The important distinction here is that CD-ROMs can store
| data indefinitely, but CD-Rs and CD-RWs can not.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| BD-R and M-Disc CD and DVDs have archival storage life.
| wtallis wrote:
| I feel like maybe you didn't understand the meaning of that
| last bit you quoted from Tom's Hardware. To be clear: the
| standard for consumer SSDs is 1 year of unpowered data
| retention after the drive's full write endurance rating has
| been exhausted.
|
| The experiment Tom's is reporting on found _twelve_ instances
| of data corruption on a low-end drive that had been subjected
| to over two thousand full drive writes, _four times_ its
| rated write endurance, then left on a shelf for _two_ years.
| This is a demonstration of a bottom of the barrel SSD _wildly
| exceeding expectations_.
|
| It's really important in conversations like this to
| accurately convey not just the existence of the failure mode,
| but also the realistic chances of running into this problem,
| and the extent of the problem when it does manifest. If a
| deliberate torture test can only produce a few _kilobytes_ of
| data corruption after twice the duration and four times the
| abuse the drive is supposed to be able to handle, this
| problem should be described as _extremely minor_.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a reason not to use a hard drive from over 20 years ago.
|
| But if you're stuck with hardware that old, an SSD isn't an
| option.
| joeel84 wrote:
| I love this story! Ha
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > certain models
|
| Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or
| is it actually apocryphal.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| He might not since it comes via a friend. Or he's forgotten
| since.
|
| Also seems not unreasonable for an employee like him not to
| specifically name and shame hardware partners. Maybe it'd all
| be fine, but I wouldn't blame him at all for not wanting to
| risk it.
| adzm wrote:
| In general, he never names companies in his posts if there is
| anything potentially negative in there.
| Ysx wrote:
| > Yes, I know which "major computer manufacturer" it is, and
| no, I'm not telling. This is consistent with longstanding blog
| policy that companies are not identified in stories, because
| the point of the story to teach something, not to call out
| companies for derision.
|
| From the follow-up post:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
| wtallis wrote:
| That's kind of a pathetic excuse, because it means that the
| "something" the story teaches is highly limited and there's
| nothing concrete for the reader to use as the basis for a
| deeper investigation.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| He genuinely might not know. I worked on a similar incident
| when our video encoder caused about 30% of a pretty mainstream
| mobile handset to hard lock when recieving a stream, requiring
| the battery to be removed to reboot the device.
|
| Neither us nor the OEM ever figured out why. They suspected
| that it was a weird combination of different bin combinations
| from different parts, but ultimately we had to change the
| method of delivering video to stop it happening.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The Dutch broadcasting service hired me to figure out why
| their homepage was crashing browsers. I turned out to be an
| animated GIF of two speakers that had an extra 0 interval
| frame in it which caused IE to crash... it doesn't take much.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| Very funny, reminds me of how Jennifer Lopez created Google Image
| Search when she wore a very deep cut green dress in 2000. So many
| people searched for "Jennifer Lopez Green Dress" that the search
| team realized they needed to include images in the search
| results. https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-
| european-c... https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-
| walks-in-versa...
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or
| audio stream causing problems?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker
| of an event over 20 years prior. It's not surprising that he
| doesn't go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond
| the key parts of the story.
| k3vinw wrote:
| Not an expert here, so I'm genuinely curious how could a video
| stream (edit: with muted audio stream) possibly cause another
| laptop in close proximity to crash?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| What is claimed in TFA is that the hard drive resonate
| frequency reacts to the Janet Jackson video in bad ways
| because that music video puts out music that interferes with
| what the hard drive expects.
|
| TFA was lacking details so this is merely a retelling.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Obviously not the video but the accompanying audio track.
| Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story
| that never actually happened exactly as described.
| Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they
| do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind
| when working on a relevant piece of tech.
|
| What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg's
| related discovery of performance degradation in servers
| from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that
| caused spinning disks to pause their heads.
| trehalose wrote:
| I doubt it could, but when you run into a problem that defies
| your understanding of reality, you might try out responses
| that also defy your understanding of reality, in the hopes
| you might gain the missing insight somewhere along the way,
| yeah?
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Also not an expert, it would have to be EMI or maybe the
| bright light was causing LEDs on the nearby laptop to
| generate voltage. LEDs can poorly work in reverse.
| geor9e wrote:
| If this is just a fiction novel world-building question: The
| video pixels create a bitstream to bitbang the gpu bus into
| emitting a 2.4-gigahertz EMF signal to exploit a flaw in the
| Wi-Fi driver.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Similary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108
| yegle wrote:
| https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.
| efortis wrote:
| I was reminded of this MythBusters episode: Tesla's Earthquake
| Machine
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHsHiKtjoag
| neomantra wrote:
| So classic. For those weary of random links, it's Cantrill and
| Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS.
|
| That was such a great machine. We rearchitected our systems
| around it.
| Natfan wrote:
| random links to a youtu.be video? pray tell, what malware
| would be transmitted from youtube.com, owned by Alphabet?
| neomantra wrote:
| It's not about privacy or malware, although those are
| important in life. Maybe I'm on Reddit too much, but I like
| knowing what will appear on the other end of a link.
|
| I originally posted my own comment with link and prose, but
| then saw GP's comment which preceded mine by an hour, so I
| deleted mine. I didn't originally realize it was that same
| video because it didn't say so, but then I recognized the
| link hash. I want people to see that video, because it's so
| great, so I added context as a reply.
| teiferer wrote:
| I'd love to know whether that story is actually true.
|
| Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago,
| puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning
| whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just
| any random person, but the more important it would be to actually
| check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades
| ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times
| "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly
| exaggerated or even outright made up.
|
| Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least
| another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!
| bitwize wrote:
| I believe it because it's a plausible variant of what I call
| the "Fus Ro Data Loss" vulnerability: shouting at hard drives
| causes them to resonate in a way that affects their ability to
| access data.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
| jacquesm wrote:
| Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. That's my
| motto. Now let me tell you about the time that we dug up this
| dinosaur egg and hatched it.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It's like Mark Twain and the rules for reselling a slave in
| Missouri https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20 "the free black man
| in Missouri could only remain in the state for 6 months before
| being taken and put on auction as a slave." only it turned out
| to be false, and evidently made up by Twain for reasons of
| fiction.
| ww520 wrote:
| That's a heck of debugging.
| tzury wrote:
| https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...
|
| Example (for both functions): /* Emits a 7-Hz
| tone for 10 seconds. True story: 7 Hz is the
| resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
| This was determined empirically in Australia, where a
| new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too
| close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up,
| all the chickens died. Your PC may not
| be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */ #include
| int main(void) { sound(7); delay(10000);
| nosound(); return 0; }
|
| from the comments over there (2002)
| sandermvanvliet wrote:
| Not very likely
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400
| maxbond wrote:
| I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to
| meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters.
| Their coop could though.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You're not generating a 7 hz tone on any sort of conventional
| audio gear, and definitely not a pc speaker.
| jamesgill wrote:
| That's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.
| monocularvision wrote:
| I am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo.
| Perfect.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79
| comments)
|
| _Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12
| comments)
| elteto wrote:
| Just a small nitpick: the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn't collapse
| because of resonance but because of flutter. It's a common
| misconception.
|
| For resonance the external driving force must match the resonance
| frequency of the system, but wind is rarely/never purely
| sinusoidal.
| echelon wrote:
| Is flutter a derivative like jerk?
| shkkmo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity#Flutter
| MarkSweep wrote:
| The derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv.
| ..
| lisper wrote:
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-03-differential-equations-spr...
| kelnos wrote:
| The article covers this:
|
| > _Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
| collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to
| drop the reference to forestall the "You forgot to mention the
| Tacoma Narrows Bridge!" comments._
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Ask me how I know you didn't read the whole article!
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Extra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait
| Kuraj wrote:
| It wasn't exactly disappointing. I loved to read The Old New
| Thing back in the day, Raymond's blog was full of stuff like
| this.
| brk wrote:
| Weird. Digital recording and mastering was definitely a thing at
| that time. You'd think they would have been crashing the HDDs of
| PCs in the recording studios.
| wtallis wrote:
| Not weird at all. This problem manifested only with some model
| of 5400RPM laptop hard drive (2.5"), but a recording studio
| would likely have been using 7200RPM 3.5" desktop drives.
| Different resonant frequencies, more sturdy mounting, more
| distance between the speakers and the hard drives.
| n8m8 wrote:
| Apparently pro tools came out in 1989, makes me think this may
| or may not be true. This article has some info about the
| mixture of analog and digital tools use to record:
|
| > The main event was a brand-new mixing console called the
| Harrison Series 10, which was the first analog console to
| feature a digital control surface, with full automation of all
| parameters. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were the first studio to
| have it, according to Jam. This meant that they could cut down
| the time it took to switch songs to about 10 minutes because
| complex mixes now required little-to-no cross-patching.
|
| https://reverb.com/news/the-making-of-janet-jacksons-rhythm-...
| sedatk wrote:
| They probably didn't use laptops in which the disk and the
| speaker are next to each other.
| bjackman wrote:
| I've had a similar case before but for a much more boring reason:
| a certain YouTube video somehow triggered a spike in power draw
| and caused my Google Pixel to reset.
|
| Google's response after looking at the crash dumps: "WAI, your
| battery is degraded" (IIRC my phone was less than 3 years old).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Could be; after ~3 years, my Samsung Galaxy S7 would reset if I
| tried to make a call with battery below ~20%. I immediately
| knew it was the battery, because I still remember noticing it
| as a kid on Nokia 3410 - calling would sometimes drop the
| battery indicator by one bar, which would come back moments
| after call ended. That's how I learned about internal
| resistance and how battery capacity is measured :).
|
| As for fixes in software, it's either treating it as WAI, or
| secretly throttling down the phone, like Apple did, for which
| they got accused of planned obsolescence. Neither choice is
| good (though actually informing the users would go a long way).
| mstep wrote:
| according to this video [0] the frequency was 84.2. that-s not
| unplausible.
|
| a known problem in cutting vinyl records are sudden bursts of
| high volume frequencies around 100 hz, that have the potential to
| make the needle skip with a normal amount of weight on the tone-
| arm.
|
| -------
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
| lelandfe wrote:
| I remember reading that the bassline in LFO's self titled broke
| the cutting needle when they were pressing it. Wonder if that
| had a similar explanation.
| rurban wrote:
| For a F1 drive axle the critical resonance frequency is around
| 2400 rpm. That's why you need to turn it up fast at start over
| the safe 4000 rpm, and never go down.
|
| Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Reminds me of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ in which there is a
| phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by
| playing a record titled _I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X_.
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| j45 wrote:
| This gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.
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