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Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ crashed some Windows laptops for years
Sometimes, the vibes are too much.
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. 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. Chen, who says he was curious how long the filter in place, writes this week that he has since learned that after Microsoft introduced a new rule for Windows 7 saying that users must be able to disable all audio processing on their computers, a hardware vendor asked for an exception.
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