Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ crashed some Windows laptops for years

is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020. Longtime Verge readers might recall the unusual story of how the music video for a Janet Jackson song, “Rhythm Nation,” could cause certain Windows laptops to crash just by being around when it’s playing. Now, in a blog post spotted by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has revealed that a filter created to deal with the problem stuck around until “at least Windows 7.” For those not familiar: in 2022, Chen wrote a pair of posts relaying a Microsoft colleague’s story about how an unnamed “major computer manufacturer” had to create a custom filter for audio playback after finding that certain frequencies in the video resonated with its laptops’ hard drives. Unfiltered, the resonance could “disrupt the hard drive’s proper operation long enough for it to result in the operating system crashing.” The issue even got its own entry in the NIST Nat ... Read full article.