Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
devblogs.microsoft.comVery 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...
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.
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.
Not sure I agree. It's a fact.
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?
Well sure, no one thinks LLMs invented bad writing, but they do copy the style.
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;
}
Not very likely
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.
> I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters.
Without disputing the conclusion, is the wavelength the right measurement, or should that be half the wavelength?
That's a more natural way to consider the resonance, certainly. What I was getting at is that if we were using a 7hz tone to explore a big room, we couldn't tell if there was a chicken in there or not. We'd have a hard time sensing an elephant. Let alone exert enough of a force to harm. Because the wave is so much larger that they barely interact.
You're not generating a 7 hz tone on any sort of conventional audio gear, and definitely not a pc speaker.
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)?
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
> I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.
You're misunderstanding the numbers here. Going from 12 to 7 Hz is most of an octave, nearly doubling wavelengths.
Also SVS's numbers are gonna be the usual marketing stuff, so they're assuming a fat room gain curve, and just looking at their website they have a disclaimer on their graphs that it doesn't represent actual total output capability. Which is a way of hiding that if you actually try to drive it that hard that low with ~3kw electrical in those voice coils are going to torch.
The non lying way to prove that claim is to show large signal Kipple results including the heat soak. They ain't doin' that here.
Basically stuff going this low is really exotic and more in the realm of servos that simulate earthquakes than traditional transducers.
Tom Danley is the world expert on this sort of thing. He used to build stuff like ultrasonic levitation ovens and full scale sonic boom simulators for JPL/NASA.
In the audio world he was first famous as the tech lead behind ServoDrive. This now defunct company made special effects subwoofers using DC rotary servo motors to drive the diaphragm. They were used as special effects subs in that era by big acts like Garth Brooks. But they didn't catch on outside that niche because very little music has significant content below 40 hz as it just turns into a muddy rumble that harms sound quality as a whole. So to use these sorts of things you have to mix for it specifically. Cinema goes lower with the rumbles down to 15hz, but that's basically it.
Getting anything that's like a clean tone at 7hz is not gonna happen without a purpose built device.
FWIW Tom Danley started his own company[1] after Servo Drive failed on the business side, where he focuses on large scale horn speakers using novel topologies. They're among the best in the business at what they. Again, they don't have anything that even remotely tries to go down to 7hz.
[1]: https://www.danleysoundlabs.com/
Tom's a nice guy, I've traded emails with him a few times over the years. He used to be pretty active on the DIY speaker building mailing lists sharing his very in depth knowledge freely.
For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16', or 32' long).
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.
https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.
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.
random links to a youtu.be video? pray tell, what malware would be transmitted from youtube.com, owned by Alphabet?
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.
Someone linked flesh simulator the other day and now my you tube is filled with some seriously weird stuff.
You could catch a bad case of algorithm poisoning if you're not careful
The malware of "up next" that eats billions of hours a year lol
I was reminded of this MythBusters episode: Tesla's Earthquake Machine
Old man yells at the cloud.
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.
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.
Is flutter a derivative like jerk?
The derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
Ask me how I know you didn’t read the whole article!
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.
-------
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.
Similary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108
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)
Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or audio stream causing problems?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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
Extra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait
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.
reminds me of the captain crunch whistle and 2600
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.
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.
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-...
They probably didn't use laptops in which the disk and the speaker are next to each other.
That’s a heck of debugging.
This gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.
That's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.
I am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo. Perfect.
Computers are so weird.
Analog devices pretending to be digital
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!
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.
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.
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.
Another reason to step away from spinning rust.
Thank dog for SSDs
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...
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.
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.
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.
Totally could be a defect in the lamination we don’t find out for years yet
The important distinction here is that CD-ROMs can store data indefinitely, but CD-Rs and CD-RWs can not.
BD-R and M-Disc CD and DVDs have archival storage life.
CD-R media is of limited shelf life as well though
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
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.)
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.
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...
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.
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.
Okay I guess you can use a 4GB CompactFlash card that cost a thousand dollars at the time. (While a laptop hard drive could reach 100GB.)
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.
The platters used to be coated with iron oxide as the magnetic coating.
Modern ones use more exotic materials.
Yes but that was like 40 years ago. I think by now the phraseology should reflect reality after about forty years.
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).
How many horsepower does your car have?
Ironically, I only started hearing the term being used in the past decade, as a colloquial alternative to solid-state storage.
“Phraseology” is subtly different.
You mean “vocabulary”, “terminology”, possibly “nomenclature”.
I love this story! Ha
> certain models
Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or is it actually apocryphal.
> 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...
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.
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.
In general, he never names companies in his posts if there is anything potentially negative in there.
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.
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.