PHISH HD TAG PATCH
We’re guessing that there were probably many other popular songs that could have provoked this hard-disk resonance to the point of failure, but Rhythm Nation was the proof-of-concept that showed this vulnerability could actively be exploited.Ĭhen reports that the laptop vendor added a frequency filter to the laptop’s own audio system in order to remove the frequency bands that tended to produce the problem, thus leaving the sound audibly unchanged but acoustically harmless.īy filtering the frequencies all the time, instead of trying to recognise Janet Jackson’s song specifically, this electronic countermeasure became a generic and proactive cybersecurity fix, not just a patch specific to one tune. …and by deliberately timing their pumps out-of-sequence so as to counteract the swing’s motion, can bring it to a complete stop again just as quickly. If you time your kicks or thrusts randomly, sometimes they boost your motion by acting in harmony with the swing, but at other times they work against the swing and slow you down instead, leaving you joggling around unsatifactorily.īut if you time your energy input so it always exactly matches the frequency of the swing, you consistently increase the amout of energy in the system, and thus your swings increase in amplitude, and you gain height rapidly.Ī skilled swingineer (on a properly designed, well-mounted, “solid-arm” swing, where the seat isn’t connected to the pivot by flexible ropes or chains – don’t try this at the park!) can send a swing right over the top in a 360-degree arc with just a few pumps…
It’s also what lets you quickly build up height and momentum on a swing. Once they’ve locked the frequency of the note they’re singing onto the natural frequency at which the glass like to vibrate, their singing continually boosts the amplitude of the vibration until it’s too much for the glass to take. Resonance, as you may know, is the name given to the phenomenon by which singers can shatter wine glasses by producing the right note for long enough to vibrate the glass to pieces.
PHISH HD TAG WINDOWS
Loosely speaking, this resonance caused the natural vibrations in the hard disk devices (which really did contain hard disks back then, made of steel or glass and spinning at 5400rpm) to be amplified and exaggerated to the point that they would crash, bringing down Windows XP along with them. The crashes, it seems were not limited to the laptop playing the song, but could also be provoked on nearby laptops that were exposed to the “vulnerability-triggering” music, and even on laptops from other vendors.Īpparently, the ultimate conclusion was that Rhythm Nation just happened to include beats of the right pitch, repeated at the right rate, that provoked a phenomenon known as resonance in the laptop disk drives of the day. Well, as Microsoft superblogger Raymond Chen pointed out last week, this very song was apparently implicated in an astonishing system crash vulnerability in the early 2000s.Īccording to Chen, a major laptop maker of the day (he didn’t say which one) complained that Windows was prone to crashing when certain music was played through the laptop speaker. This was the era of shoulder pads, MTV, big-budget dance videos, and the sort of in-your-ears-and-in-your-face lyrical musicality that even YouTube’s contemporary auto-transcription system renders at times simply as: …as upbeat, in fact, as the catchy Janet Jackson dance number Rhythm Nation, released in 1989 (yes, it really was that long ago)? So, wouldn’t it be nice if the public service could be upbeat once in a while… Something cannot universally be true if it is ever false, even for a single moment.
You’ve probably heard the old joke: “Humour in the public service? It’s no laughing matter!”īut the thing with downbeat, blanket judgements of this sort is that it only takes a single counter-example to disprove them.
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