Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994

by montalbano • 7 months ago

310 124 7 months ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

etchalon• 7 months ago

Computers are so weird.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 7 months ago

Analog devices pretending to be digital

nntwozz• 7 months ago

Another reason to step away from spinning rust.

Thank dog for SSDs

functionmouse• 7 months ago

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...

mc322• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

The platters used to be coated with iron oxide as the magnetic coating.

Modern ones use more exotic materials.

vee-kay3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

wtallis5• 7 months ago

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.

Dylan168072• 7 months ago

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.

wtallis5• 7 months ago

IDE SSDs have been a niche but readily-available product for as long as consumer SSDs have been mainstream. CompactFlash cards ensured that the necessary controller chips were available.

joeel84• 7 months ago

I love this story! Ha

ninalanyon• 7 months ago

certain models

Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or is it actually apocryphal.

CamouflagedKiwi• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

In general, he never names companies in his posts if there is anything potentially negative in there.

Ysx• 7 months ago

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...

wtallis5• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

jacquesm3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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...

leobg• 7 months ago

If this hadn’t been published in 2015, you’d all call it AI slop:

When the German engineer Karl Benz invented the first petroleum-powered automobile, he did not just create an engine with wheels; he set in motion an industry that revolutionized the way society was structured.

cjs_ac• 7 months ago

LLMs write like a high-schooler padding out an essay about something they only pretend to care about with vacuous adjectives and adverbs because that’s how most commercial writing reads.

nkrisc• 7 months ago

Well sure, no one thinks LLMs invented bad writing, but they do copy the style.

deIeted• 7 months ago

Well, that's human slop, and it's actually more insidious than AI slop. You know what's weird? We've had this for almost twenty years. This human slop in writing this is the first time ever that this painful writing has been addressed by someone else on a comment on the internet. I've raised it so many times, but it's the first time I've ever seen one other person acknowledge it. Like, how crazy is that? Is the last twenty years been a fever dream?

tomcam• 7 months ago

Not sure I agree. It's a fact.

behringer• 7 months ago

All he had to do to fix this was say "he drove forward" instead of set in motion. So close to a great simile.

GaryBluto• 7 months ago

Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or audio stream causing problems?

wanderingstan• 7 months ago

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.

theologic4• 7 months ago

I won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right. However, some of the overtones definitely are.

k3vinw• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

trehalose• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Similary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108

yegle• 7 months ago

https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.

efortis• 7 months ago

I was reminded of this MythBusters episode: Tesla's Earthquake Machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHsHiKtjoag

neomantra4• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

random links to a youtu.be video? pray tell, what malware would be transmitted from youtube.com, owned by Alphabet?

ofalkaed3• 7 months ago

it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS.

For me, that is less meaningful and more random than a youtube link. I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.

beAbU• 7 months ago

Old man yells at the cloud.

teiferer• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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

jacquesm3• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

ndiddy• 7 months ago

There's a really good video here that shows that it likely happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY Rhythm Nation is unique because it uses a nonstandard tuning that shifts the notes to less-used frequencies. The video creator found a paper that studied the resonant frequency of various 2.5 inch laptop hard drives, and found that it matched up with the frequency of the low E note used in Rhythm Nation.

theologic4• 7 months ago

As somebody that actually had development experiences, both PC companies and in the hard drive industry, I posted an upper level post on this. I won't repeat it here, but an awful lot of this sounds apocryphal but some truth behind it.

ww520• 7 months ago

That’s a heck of debugging.

tzury• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Not very likely

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400

maxbond2• 7 months ago

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.

jasonwatkinspdx3• 7 months ago

You're not generating a 7 hz tone on any sort of conventional audio gear, and definitely not a pc speaker.

clolege• 7 months ago

The SVS PB-17 Ultra advertises a range of 12-220Hz at -3dB. I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.

And most speakers can play infrasound for many non-sinusoidal waveforms [0]. They'll drop the fundamental and some lower-end harmonics but can still give a sense of what it sounds like

[0] https://szynalski.com/tone#7,saw,v0.5

zahlman• 7 months ago

If I feed a 7hz input to some cheap hand-made thing like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liSEwqdq7aA , will it not vibrate at 7hz and thus produce a 7hz "tone" (disregarding that humans won't perceive that as sound, at least not the fundamental)?

conradojordan2• 7 months ago

You can with your hands, just shake them

tzs• 7 months ago

Who said the source has to stationary? Doppler shift for the win.

conradojordan2• 7 months ago

An easier way to generate a 7 Hz tone is to just move your hands back and forth 7 times a second. Either way you won't be able to hear because we can't hear 7 Hz anyway

jamesgill• 7 months ago

That's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.

monocularvision• 7 months ago

I am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo. Perfect.

dang• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Is flutter a derivative like jerk?

shkkmo• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity#Flutter

MarkSweep• 7 months ago

The derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...

lisper• 7 months ago

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-03-differential-equations-spr...

kelnos• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Ask me how I know you didn’t read the whole article!

thimkerbell• 7 months ago

Extra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait

Kuraj• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

wtallis5• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

They probably didn't use laptops in which the disk and the speaker are next to each other.

bjackman• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

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.

rurban2• 7 months ago

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

w-m• 7 months ago

Wouldn’t a multiple of the resonance frequency also be problematic then? Why doesn’t the axle disintegrate at 4800 rpm?

rurban2• 7 months ago

Because that's way above the critical resonance frequency. 4000 - 25000 is safe

OisinMoran• 7 months ago

Reminds me of Gödel, 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• 7 months ago

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

j45• 7 months ago

This gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.

btilly• 7 months ago

https://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html is a similar story from IBM in the 1960s. Except that there was nothing accidental about the problem.

modzu• 7 months ago

reminds me of the captain crunch whistle and 2600

baobun• 7 months ago

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

Reality must have been falling apart for someone for a brief moment there.

Gazoche• 7 months ago

And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!

That’s about the time I would have given up on the investigation and called in an exorcist.

WYSIMOLWYG• 7 months ago

Reminds me (tangentially) of the story of the Raspberry Pi 2 and Xenon flash. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...

theologic4• 7 months ago

The story is slightly unusual because I was actually managing a part of the engineering group at IBM that was integrating hard disk drives into ThinkPads during that era. I am not suggesting that it could not have happened or that it might have occurred at another major laptop manufacturer, but many details regarding the exact source and nature do not feel quite right. Music was a massive issue. It's just that it became an industry issue a little later as production moved to Taiwan and we were increasing our AD curve.

The issue of music crashing a hard disk drive was a genuine problem. Since I later specialized in hard drives, I can confirm that every manufacturer faced this issue as multimedia laptops became more common and we transitioned to higher areal densities. To state the obvious, we shrank the tracks every time to achieve larger capacities. We were doubling capacities every nine to twelve months when we first introduced MR, GMR, and PMR heads. The hard drive industry employs incredible control theory experts due to the requirement of keeping a head on track. Personal opinion, which I probably should research, but I believe that one of the densest concentrations of Ph.D.s in leading edge control theory could be found within the hard disk drive industry. Amazing things happen when you're trying to fly nanometers off the disc in a track that is maybe 100 nanometers wide at the time.

By 2010ish, as part of our development suite, we actually played music through the speakers to identify these types of issues. The origin of this practice actually came from the ODMs in Taiwan. Therefore, Janet Jackson was not the standard qualification song we used. Instead, it was popular hits from the Chinese pop market. There were also Western songs within the suite, but I remember our team blasting Chinese pop songs at full volume on multimedia laptops.

Laptop development began moving heavily to Taiwan in the mid nineties. By the time the early two thousands arrived, there was a massive amount of competence in Taiwan regarding chassis design engineering. As time progressed, every American PC company continued to outsource development to Taiwan and eventually to China. As development was outsourced, the ODMs would work with suppliers because we wanted to present solutions to the OEMs that were free of issues.

EDIT: By the way, it wasn't necessarily a blue-screen crash. I'm not saying that that couldn't happen, but generally what we did is we had the throughput test that we were run on the hard drives. Then we would go blast the music full bore and there were certain bandwidth requirements that we needed to get out of the hard disk drive. So to add some more details behind this, I would describe it as a performance issue and the blue screen issue was relatively minor. However, this was a number of years ago and I don't remember the exact percentages.

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)

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