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.

I won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right. However, some of the overtones definitely are.

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.