Is a vulnerabiluty which has been known for hundreds of years. It's why soldiers are trained to march across bridges out-of-step.

Just playing a tune can crash a computer ?

Does that mean that our computers could eventually be made to crash if some evil genius found the right frequencies to put into an audio track ?

Only if you've got spinning rust inside. SSDs should not suffer from this due to having no moving parts. And since they're are no moving parts on your processor, etc. They should all be safe too.

I suppose you could damage someone's fans with the right frequency, but there are so many different fans in use, that finding the right frequency for your intended victim would be a lot of work.

I'd say your safe for now...

Current computer parts may not have moving parts but that doesn't mean you can't have a well crafted program to generate frequencies that affect interior operations, e.g. getting something to clock at around 2.4GHz might be able to block and/or mimic a Bluetooth device.

I’m thinking maybe something like the 19 forbidden notes from the [1]Boîte Diabolique ?

[1] https://youtu.be/mE0takm9TX0

It was done on purpose. Terrorists may now use your radio to target you. Be careful.

At the time XP came out, that song was a ten year old favorite, and played a LOT on radio stations nation-wide. And the tasteless freaks who enjoy that song frequently cranked it. Often, I am sure, around laptops of all makes and models (especially on college campuses).

Shirley this would have quickly become a fairly well known problem to those of us in the trade if it were true? Sheer numbers alone suggest it could not possibly have been overlooked.

Depends on the source of the sound, I guess. Sound waves from a relatively distant radio would probably have a different effect to sound waves from the internal laptop speakers. Which perhaps also accounts for why it was only certain models - positioning and size of the internal speakers would also be relevant.

GJC

How about the example where "playing the video on one laptop would crash another nearby laptop"?

I'd like to see this one demonstrated in a trustworthy lab. I've searched online, all I can find is assertions (basically, every tech publication has picked up on the same story). But I see no proof.

Note that I'll be equally happy if it's real or a hoax ... I have no dog in this race.

Indeed, I am sceptical about that remote action, too. Just possible if the two machines were sat together on the same desk, I suppose, but I'm more inclined to just ignore that bit.

GJC

Indeed, my thoughts on this were "Cool story, bro". My second thoughts we 'why state video, when it's the sound that's allegedly having the effect?". Then I thought "why just this song, there's a lot of music with varying tempo and beats, so why just this one song?". Given I listen to anything from classical, rock, metal, Norse folk music, electronica, drum 'n bass, hip hop, jazz etc through a decent set of monitor speakers by my desk, at reasonable volume, and none of it has triggered anything.. I think there's a whiff about this story.

Heady days when IDE was king and disks would crash due to orientation, would seas control of the primary bus regardless of the jumper settings and Amstrad PC set on interleave settings of 1:1 did not make it faster but needed 1:3 to make it better.

Miss it. Hell no!

The Black Team found the right read/write pattern and supposedly got the whole drive rocking.

Never thought you could do it on something so (relatively) small.

Lesson learned.

We figured out how to make disk drives walk when I was at DEC ...

Few modern machines have hard disk drives, never mind drives that rotate at the unfashionably slow speed of 5400 revolutions per minute. Indeed everything consumer grade seems to have migrated to 5900 RPM...

Jackson Five 400?

I like to keep the past alive (and I'm a tight-wad), so all of my PCs have 5400 spinning rust drives. Am I at risk, I wonder?

Following the CVE link takes me to mitre.org, which links to nist.gov, which links to the Raymond Chen blog. No mention anywhere, as far as I can tell, of what precise brand of HDD is affected.

I guess all I can do is ban Janet Jackson from the house until I find out. I can live with that.

I wouldn't worry too much about attacks like this (nobody cares about you unless you're working in critical infrastructure), but everything you have is running 10x slower than it could be. Spinning rust drives really are the bottleneck on anything they're in.

We had a 5 year old computer at work that had a 1 TB HD - it would take 5 minutes to boot chunka chunka chunka chunka. This week we replaced it with a cheapass 870 EVO SATA SSD (nowhere near the fastest drive you can get) and now it boots in 15 seconds. Compiles that took 10 minutes take 30 seconds.

Not everything about the past was good.

> Not everything about the past was good.

Including Janet Jackson's music?

The CVE-writer(s) should have named manufacturers and drive models! Otherwise, it's just sensationalistic click-bait.

In my experience (scads of USB flash drives, few SSDs), flash drives tend to fail without warning. Spinning rust, much less so. Thus I use actual-disc-disc-drives for bulk data, and SSDs for compilation-related subdirs: /usr/src/, /usr/ports/, /usr/obj/, /usr/xobj/, and /usr/xenocara/.

" In my experience (scads of USB flash drives, few SSDs), flash drives tend to fail without warning. Spinning rust, much less so. "

A very good point. Also SSD tends to fail irrevocably, whereas if you have the dosh you can get spinning platters read in a cleanroom supposing the drive electronics have failed. There's also a so far largely undetermined potential for data loss from SSD due to charge leakage, but I have some 30 year old platter HDDs that can still be read reliably.

So very definitely horses for courses, rather than 'bleeding edge' versus 'legacy', but the bottom line is nevertheless 'back up and back up'.

Fun story. But please, when writing, lay off the anti-Black prejudice. Sure, you may not like Janet Jackson's music yourself, especially the old stuff, but she's still an icon for many people. She's as talented as anyone else in that family, has been making music successfully for decades, and has suffered a *lot* of nasty attacks because of her race and gender.

It's really not a good look to be bashing Black culture so casually, when the story's actually about something else. Do better, please, vultures!

WTF?

For the record, I've been listening to a lot of the old Motown stuff for the last ten days or so, male and female artists, mostly black, in memory of Lamont Dozier. I didn't have to purchase any tunes, I already own them on CD, and they are all on the permanent rotation here at chez jake.

Calling crap crap has nothing to do with race or gender.

The writing was lazy, talking about Janet Jackson as though her music is axiomatically rubbish. The story was a fun piece about music trashing HDs. No need for casual dismissal of the music and its creator, surely.

I fully appreciate that El Reg has a casual tone, but there's casual-fun and casual-thoughtless. Let's try and avoid the latter.

You're trolling, right? The only subjective thing written in that article is where the author wrote 'the song isn't THAT bad'. Anti-black? Are you one of those people who looks for AND successfully finds racism wherever you see fit?

Actually, I particularly noted the phrase: "hardly anybody listens to Janet Jackson anymore." Which is absolutely untrue.

I saw her on 'Top Of The Pops' last, err, 2004?

Top of the Pops stopped in 2006...

So we can't criticise the music of anyone who is black? Isn't that rather counter-productive?

GJC

Who's "we" in that question?

And there's criticism and then there's casual denigration of a hugely successful musician who's suffered huge prejudice in her career, for a cheap gag.

Causually denigrating a musician isn't attacking all black musicians. Janet Jackson is objectively crap: there, I've said it. It's only overly sensitive troublemakers who see a race problem in everything. There are a lot of white musicians about whom many people would say 'nobody listens to them any more'.

Nobody listens to Scott Joplin much any more, relatively. He's certainly not crap.

And Michael Jackson, good riddance.

"the song isn't actually that bad."

Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?

My wife has a Shakira CD with some kind of DRM. It is printed on the case "will not play on a PC or Mac".

It says nothing about not playing on a Sun Sparc server. So I put in to see what would happen. Instant kernel panic and dropped to the OK prompt. Yikes!

It only took a few seconds for the support phone to start ringing...

"Don't worry, I'm working on the problem already and should have it back up in a few minutes"

Define "modern".

Come to think of it, define "machine". SSD ain't.