Technology

You know what's really stupid about this

Notepad existed for decades, resisting the general trend of Microsoft software, and it continued to do one thing, and do it well (for the purposes of this argument, let's not get started on line endings)

If someone wanted to do more than just view text files, there was wordpad, a stripped down word processor, that would have been the perfect application to add support for markdown to.

Except they killed it, because enough people must have realised that the word processor bundled with the OS did everything they needed without having to pay Microsoft a subscription for Word.

So now Microsoft is trying to turn notepad into the rudimentary word processor that people expect to come with their OS, destroying the aspect that made it useful

From my post elsewhere on this topic:

Yet another in my ongoing series of headlines about how messed up Microsoft and tech in general is by using just Notepad as an example.

Why Notepad? Because it was supposed to be the most basic built in text editor for the Windows environment. They thing that would always work. The thing that would do exactly what it was supposed to no matter what.

They have messed it up so bad that it's now an attack vector.

It's the prime example of how they keep taking things that work and make them worse.

I thought you were joking https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-writing-with-ai-in-notepad-4088b954-c97b-46dc-813f-959be01746d5

This has nothing to do with AI. They added markdown to it and now links work.

The title of the article is weird because it's the only place AI is mentioned.

As I'm in no position to demand company wide switch to a sane operating system I'm constantly in awe of new and innovative ways Microsoft has managed to make my day suck. One such thing is that they have decided that Win 11 Notepad will convert everything it touches to UTF-16. That's kind of a problem when an external system expects ISO-8859-15 and users have decades of experience in editing said config files with Notepad.

Why, you know on Earth, would they add "ai" to notepad of all things?

The remote code execution isn't "via a text file". It's via a link in a text file, which Notepad now lets you actually click.

Just don't click on links you don't know the destination of (Notepad shows the destination for https links at least, on hover) and you don't have any remote code executing.

Have they made notepad a webapp yet? Lol.

They've been enshittifying it for over a year.

Use LibreOffice instead. It's available on both Windows and Linux.

Mac guy who uses Windows at work. It can be disabled.

On my Windows 11 workstation, the AI stuff and Markdown stuff is gone from Notepad. It's very easy to do in the settings, and there's even a gear icon right on the main window. As a Mac user I know ⌘+, (Command + Comma) opens Settings, but with Windows, it's typically File --> Settings or Tools --> Settings or something like that. Notepad makes it even easier. The AI stuff can be disabled with a click. The Markdown stuff will warn you that any Markdown will be converted to plain text, which is fine, because I don't even know Markdown. (I assume it's similar to the formatting used on Lemmy, Reddit, et al.)

If there's a way to deny Notepad access to the network, I don't know it, and probably can't do it on a locked-down workstation anyway. They lock down a lot of dumb shit, like the wallpaper. We can't change the wallpaper. I can't change my phone number in my Outlook profile, either — it just goes to the switchboard. I can put my direct line in my email signature and they actually encourage that. Dumb shit like that.

Anyway, TextEdit (the Mac equivalent) has none of that dumb shit AFAIK. It always opens in small windows and the text is super tiny. Oddly enough, after a restart, Notepad wants the text two sizes too big, but I do CTRL+- (Control plus Minus/Dash) I think, twice, and it's just right. Honestly I like Notepad a little more. The real GOAT (on both Mac and Windows!) is Sticky Notes, though. It's not the same application but it has the same functions.

Nopepad now.

Isn't the point of a RCE that the user doesn't need to click and run the malicious code? What makes this different from the user opening a site on a browser which is filled with links?

No one:

Micro$lop: you know what this needs shoehorned into it? AI!

Can anyone tell me if Win 10 LTSC IoT 21H2 is also affected? This is the only M$ OS I run on a few devices (I pretentiously use Linux BTW). If notepad.exe on LTSC is still being molested by updates, that's beyond fucked.