Comment by Fiveplus
3 days ago
We have officially reached the logical conclusion of the feature-bloat-to-vulnerability pipeline.
For nearly thirty years, notepad.exe was the gold standard for a "dumb" utility which was a simple, win32-backed buffer for strings that did exactly one thing...display text. An 8.8 CVSS on a utility meant for viewing data is a fundamental failure of the principle of least privilege.
At some point, they need to stop asking "can we add this feature?" and start asking "does this text editor need a network-aware rendering stack?"
> At some point, they need to stop asking "can we add this feature?" and start asking "does this text editor need a network-aware rendering stack?"
They didn’t stop there. They also asked “does this need AI?” and came up with the wrong answer.
If I had to guess, the mandate to cram AI in everywhere came down from Nadella and the executive level with each level of management having KPIs for AI in their product all the way down. Much like the "everything has to be .NET even though nobody has any idea what .NET means" when it was first introduced and every MS product suddenly sprouted .NET at the end of their names. When executive management gives stupid non-negotiable orders, they get stupid results.
AI is useful but these management type typically don’t know how to make it useful.
3 replies →
It’s just resumé driven development. Corporate droids gotta justify their salaries somehow. It doesn’t pay to call software “done”.
Individual developers or even developer management doesn't get much of a say in product direction at large corporations. The product management folks are who decide what features go in and when.
1 reply →
Even if you talk to users, you can do it the wrong way. Big companies are incentivized by the stock market to care more about new users than existing ones because their only focus is growth. Growth can't be rooted in your existing users is a common feeling in product management circles. If you try to do things for people other than your existing users, then you end up doing odd stuff that at best is a mild annoyance. More likely you hurt their ability to continue using the app.
2 replies →
Unjustified downvoting. You absolutely have a point. Not just software, also the gazillion UI/UX designers. They keep moving things around and changing colors and fucking things up just to justify their salaries. Case in point: Google maps. It was perfect 15 years ago. We don't need vomit inducing color changes every 2 years
Microsoft is driving AI adoption. Why blame tge workers for this?
19 replies →
And yet, if they were raising a Series A, they'd be lauded as "disruptors"
2 replies →
It is a bit odd that they basically took one of Microsoft’s most universally hated features (Clippy) and then decided “let’s put this into literally every part of the OS”.
I think they came up the the exact right answer like:
> How do I add more features to get a promotion
But can it generate qrcode already?
"For nearly thirty years, notepad.exe was the gold standard for a "dumb" utility which was a simple, win32-backed buffer for strings that did exactly one thing...display text."
Well, except that this did not prevent it from having embarrassing bugs. Google "Bush hid the facts" for an example. I'm serious, you won't be disappointed.
I think complexity is relative. At the time of the "Bush hid the facts" bug, nailing down Unicode and text encodings was still considered rocket science. Now this is a solved problem and we have other battles we fight.
As funny as the "Bush hid the facts" bug may be, there is a world of difference between an embarassing mistake by a function that guesses the text encoding wrong, and a goddamn remote code execution with an 8.8 score
> and we have other battles we fight.
Except no, we don't. notepad.exe was DONE SOFTWARE. It was feature complete. It didn't have to change. This is not a battle that needed fighting, this was hitting a brick wall with ones fist for no good reason, and then complaining about the resulting pain.
They also wanted to use the popularity of Notepad, so they replaced it with an AI bloatware version instead of creating a new app with extra features.
3 replies →
For a good built in "done" text editor, theres apples textedit. It's barely changed since NeXTSTEP and works flawlessly and is FOSS. As much as I hate apple there's a reason I have GNUstep installed on most of my *nix boxes
I would agree if it were RCE
This definition in the first paragraph on Wikipedia matches my understanding of it as a security consultant:
> The ability to trigger arbitrary code execution over a network (especially via a wide-area network such as the Internet) is often referred to as remote code execution (RCE or RCX). --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_code_execution
Issues in handling local files, whether they require user interaction or not, are just that
Doesn't take away from the absurdity that notepad isn't a notepad but does extensive file contents parsing
> Except no, we don't. notepad.exe was DONE SOFTWARE
While 8.8 score is embarrassing, by no measure notepad was done software. It couldn't load a large text file for one, its search was barely functional, had funky issues with encoding, etc.
Notepad++ is closer to what should be expected from an OS basic text editor
10 replies →
> nailing down Unicode and text encodings was still considered rocket science. Now this is a solved problem
I wish…
Detecting text encoding is only easy if all you need to contend with is UTF16-with-BOM, UTF8-with-BOM, UTF8-without-BOM, and plain ASCII (which is effectively also UTF8). As soon as you might see UTF16 or UCS without a BOM, or 8-bit codepages other than plain ASCII (many apps/libs assume that these are always CP1252, a superset of the printable characters of ISO-8859-1, which may not be the case), things are not fully deterministic.
Thankfully UTF8 has largely won out over the many 8-bit encodings, but that leaves the interesting case of UTF8-with-BOM. The standard recommends against using it, that plain UTF8 is the way to go, but to get Excel to correctly load a UTF8 encoded CSV or similar you must include the BOM (otherwise it assumes CP 1252 and characters above 127 are corrupted). But… some apps/libs are completely unaware that UTF8-with-BOM is a thing at all so they load such files with the first column header corrupted.
Source: we have clients pushing & pulling (or having us push/pull) data back & forth in various CSV formats, and we see some oddities in what we receive and what we are expected to send more regularly than you might think. The real fun comes when something at the client's end processes text badly (multiple steps with more than one of them incorrectly reading UTF8 as CP1252, for example) before we get hold of it, and we have to convince them that what they have sent is non-deterministically corrupt and we can't reliably fix it on the receiving end…
> to get Excel to correctly load a UTF8 encoded CSV or similar you must include the BOM
Ah so that’s the trick! I’ve run into this problem a bunch of times in the wild, where some script emits csv which works on the developers machine but fails strangely with real world data.
Good to know there’s a simple solution. I hope I remember your comment next time I see this!
6 replies →
The very fact that UTF-8 itself discouraged from using the BOM is just so alien to me. I understand they want it to be the last encoding and therefore not in need of a explicit indicator, but as it currently IS NOT the only encoding that is used, it makes is just so difficult to understand if I'm reading any of the weird ASCII derivatives or actual Unicode.
It's maddening and it's frustrating. The US doesn't have any of these issues, but in Europe, that's a complete mess!
11 replies →
There is a difference between a bug you laugh at and walk away and a bug a scammer laughs at as he walks away with your money.
When I open something in Notepad, I don't expect it to be a possible attack vector for installing ransomware on my machine. I expect it to be text. It being displayed incorrectly is supposed to be the worst thing that could happen. There should be no reason to make Notepad capable of recognizing links, let alone opening them. Save that crap for VS Code or some other app I already know not to trust.
Embarrassing bugs are not RCEs. Also the industry should be more mature now, not less. But move fast and break things, I guess...
We have reached peak software stability, it's all gonna be downhill from here.
3 replies →
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts
To be honest, the 'bush hid the facts' bug was funny and was not really a vulnerability that could be exploited, unless... you understood Chinese and the alternative text would manage to pursuade you to do something harmful.
In fact, those were the good days, when a mere affair with your secretary would be enough to jeopardize your career. The pendulum couldn't have swung more since.
> unless... you understood Chinese and the alternative text would manage to persuade you to do something harmful
Oh, here is the file I just saved... I see that it now tells me to rob a bank and donate the money to some random cult I'm just learning about.
Let me make a web search to understand how to contact the cult leader and proceed with my plan!
(luckily LLMs were not a thing back then :) )
I am pretty sure it's possible to fix that entire category of bugs without introducing RCE vulnerabilities.
> Now this is a solved problem
Is that so? I ran pretty often in problems with programs having trouble with non-ANSI characters
Fascinating reading about that bug, thanks for sharing
It's not solved, we just don't have to guess the encoding any more because it's always UTF-8.
I couldn't agree more. A text editor exposing an attack surface via a network stack is precisely the kind of bloat that makes modern computing ultra-fragile.
I actually built a "dumb" alternative in Rust last week specifically to escape this. It’s a local-only binary—no network permissions, encrypted at rest, and uses FIPS-compliant bindings (OpenSSL) just to keep the crypto boring and standard.
It’s inspectable if you want to check the crate: https://github.com/BrowserBox/FIPSPad
Why does my text-editor need to do "encryption at rest"? If I want data encrypted, I store it in an encrypted drive with a transparent en/decryption layer.
That is completely valid for personal threat models, I rely on LUKS/BitLocker for my daily driver too.
The specific gap this fills is 'Defense in Depth' + compliance. OS-level encryption (like FDE) is transparent once you log in. If you walk away from an unlocked machine, FDE does nothing.
App-level encryption, however, ensures the specific sensitive notes remain encrypted on disk even while the OS is running and the user is authenticated.
It's also portable as it allows the encrypted blob to be moved across untrusted transports (email, USB, cloud) without needing to set up an encrypted container/volume on the destination.
For FIPS/NIST workflows, relying solely on the OS often isn't enough for the auditor; having the application control the keys explicitly satisfies the 'data protection' control regardless of the underlying storage medium.
4 replies →
> FIPS-compliant bindings (OpenSSL)
Using FIPS mode can be insecure because the latest FIPS-compliant version can be years older than the latest non-FIPS one with all the updates.
The only time it makes sense to use the FIPS version is where there is a legal or contractual requirement that trumps security considerations.
While I think this is good advice, the fact that it's true feels backward to me. "We have a legal or contractual obligation to be less secure than we otherwise would be." Just seems silly.
1 reply →
What does notepad need openssl for?
Encryption at rest (AES-GCM).
To meet FIPS 140-3, I can't roll my own crypto; I have to use a validated module.
I actually only link OpenSSL on Linux, and then only if it's in FIPS-mode. On Windows (CNG) and macOS (CoreCrypto), I use the native OS primitives to avoid the dependency and keep the binary small.
For the built-in web-browser instance it likely contains by now.
6 replies →
Looks like it's using it for encryption.
Cryptography I guess
This is all vibecoded FWIW, I think it'd be cool if authors more proactively disclosed this.
What have you built lately?
Question is, did they even realize they added a network-aware rendering stack...
Is it giving MS too much credit to suggest that they probably didn't just vibe code their new notepad?
>At some point, they need to stop asking "can we add this feature?" and start asking "does this text editor need a network-aware rendering stack?"
But so far as I can tell the bug isn't related to "network-aware rendering stack" or AI (as other people are blindly speculating)?
From MSRC:
>How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?
>An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files.
Sounds like a bug where you could put an url like \\evil.example\virus.exe into a link, and if a user clicks it executes virus.exe
That's why we have text editors, markdown viewers, image viewers, etc.
You were never able to "click a link" in Notepad in the past.
Mixing responsibilities brings with it lots of baggage, security vulnerabilities being one of them.
I think there are more text editors around that render clickable links than there are that don't. Even your terminal probably renders clickable links.
Despite the scary words and score this wouldn't even be a vulnerability if people weren't so hard wired to click every link they see. It's not some URL parsing gone wrong triggering an RCE. Most likely they allowed something like file:// links which of course opens that file. Totally valid link, but the feature must be neutered to only http(s):// because people.
1 reply →
> That's why we have text editors, markdown viewers, image viewers, etc.
This is so 80s. Now we have systemd (svchost.exe), wayland (explorer) and a webbrowser (chrome). You don't need more.
1 reply →
The day calculator brought me to an MS Store login was the day I became a radical.
Mine was when they asked me to rate the calculator on the store.
Is it as good as Android's calculator?
https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2911981
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2911981
https://github.com/LineageOS/android_packages_apps_ExactCalc...
https://medium.com/@jnebos/the-humble-android-calculator-4f1...
The calculator on my Pixel phone has a privacy policy. I want to get off this ride.
That's exactly what it was, I misremembered.
But a few months ago, I gave 11 a shot on my gaming PC Windows partition, because 10 had reached end of life, and Minecraft refused to work on it at all, Minecraft then required the store login, without any recourse.
So I wiped out the Windows partition and decided Java Edition on Linux was good enough. My kids stopped playing Bedrock anyway. All the other games I cared about worked on Linux too.
For me, that's really just Rocket League, but that might die when EAC is added, so another toxic company might be out of my life soon. It'll be sad after 4k hours, but I expected the day to come the day Epic took over.
Sober for Roblox is good enough for occasional play with the kids.
And just 1 person at work is keeping Windows alive, hopefully they're going to retire soon.
Unfortunately, code execution in text editors aren't a new thing. Vim had one published in 2019: https://github.com/numirias/security/blob/master/doc/2019-06...
Another in 2004: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2002-1377
Neither vim nor Notepad are purely for displaying text though.
> Neither vim nor Notepad are purely for displaying text though.
Up until fairly recently, that's exactly all Notepad did.
Vim has those bugs because of bloat, and now Notepad does too. AI, Markdown, Spellchecker, etc, nobody asked for this bloat.
vim is a far larger program than a text editor.
notepad was always a plain text editor. It had enough problems with unicode and what that means to be "plain text".
EDIT: THE OLD NOTEPAD IS STILL IN WINDOWS AND WE CAN USE IT!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3845356/...
You basically have to find the "execution alias" setting and disable notepad and you get the ole reliable :D
OLD POST:
This has hurt me specifically. Since I work without IDEs, no VIM, no vs code. On linux I use nano, on windows I use Notepad. I like the minimalism and the fact that I have absolute control, and that I can work on any machine without needing to introduce an external install.
Last couple of years notepad started getting more features, but I'm very practical so I just ignored them, logged out of my account when necessary, opted out of features in settings, whatever.
But now this moment feels like I must change something, we need a traditional notepad.exe or just copy it from a previous version, I'll try adding NOTEPAD.exe to a thumb drive and having that. But it's a shame that it breaks the purity of "working with what's installed".
I had a USB that I carried around with me with a whole bunch of portable apps on it. That allowed me to have some kind of "standard environment" I could rely on.
I've since migrated to Linux 100% (outside of work) and whilst there are the odd annoyances, it's been a breath of fresh air compared to Windows. And I can have a good chuckle almost once a week these days with each new Windows consumer hostility coming across the HN front page.
You can do that (probably even better) on linux with a Live Usb. I have a fedora one on my keychain since it has firefox and libreoffice included by default
> the purity of "working with what's installed".
Oh, a kindred spirit!
I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.
(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)
Not having one’s configuration present is kneecapping yourself needlessly.
If you’re going to have a custom config, you might as well have a custom executable.
1 reply →
I played with the preinstalled languages in windows before, but the legacy stuff dizzied me before llms existed.
now that llms exist I am learning with dotnet, that now comes with windows, (or at least it comes with winget, and you can install a lot of kosher software, which is almost as good as having it preinstalled.)
If I ever hop onto an older machine I'll use the gpt to see what I get, i recall there's vbscript, apparently a .net compiler+runtime, and I saw a js interpreter in very old OS too.
A big inspiration in this realm is FogBugz historical "Wasabi". Their idea of compiling to PHP and c# i think it was, because it's what most OS come with, and their corpo clients can use it as it. It's in a joel spolsky blog post somewhere.
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?
Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain
Shh, please. If MS find out, they'll add a parrot to "improve" it.
There's still old tiny Metapad. And also more modern and fully featured (but still light) Notepad 2/3/4 and Notepad++. For full replacement, i just renamed all instances to notepad.exe.bak, back then on Windows 7 & 10, and rename-replaced it with metapad.exe. Though, i guess with UWP apps (modern Notepad is one), it's just file associations nowadays. There's surely some mass-reassociate utility around?
Btw, nano is only 50/50 chance that's it's pre-installed. Learn some vim, will ya? ;)
If he learns vim... gasp ...he will be cursed with having to install vim in every machine he touches for the rest of his life! :)
1 reply →
Does Windows come with a compiler I don't know about? Or do you only code batch files and VB Script?
> This has hurt me specifically. Since I work without IDEs, no VIM, no vs code. On linux I use nano, on windows I use Notepad. I like the minimalism and the fact that I have absolute control, and that I can work on any machine without needing to introduce an external install.
What's your day job? Are you self employed?
EDIT.COM still works in dosbox
Edit is ported to win11 and edit(.exe) should work in your shell of choice.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/
5 replies →
Except it keeps reverting to the new notepad every few days….
I’ve been fighting this for the last couple of weeks but it just doesn’t stick
Did you bring out the big guns? Regedit.exe
It'd be more hilarious if it weren't so sad. In just 10 years a disturbingly large number of huge development teams decided that making a GUI application using the old ways [1] was too hard and decided to ship an entire web engine (electron) to render 10 buttons.
[1] (native GUI widgets? agggh)
Large swathes of this industry have an obsession with investing 10x more resources into the wrong thing, than simply fixing the underlying issue.
Which 10 buttons?
Things started going downhill when they added a Bing option to one of the menus, which was only very recently after they added support for *nix newlines. A very mishandled product, but then the whole OS has been mishandled since 10. Some would say 7.
> At some point, they need to stop asking "can we add this feature?" and start asking "does this text editor need a network-aware rendering stack?"
Everyone has to prove their worth by involving more people in ever embiggening trainwrecks every quarters in this day and age just to maintain employment, and without tangibly threatening anyone else's while at it. That's where the features are coming from. That's what needs to be fixed. Which also goes way beyond engineering.
> viewing data is a fundamental failure of the principle of least privilege.
I read the cwe not cve, was wrong. It's still early in the morning...
You are mistaken:
> The malicious code would execute in the security context of the user who opened the Markdown file, giving the attacker the same permissions as that user.
> If I read it correctly (but could be mistaken), it runs with setuid root
I am certain you are mistaken. I couldn't find anything that hints at notepad running with elevated privileges.
People very often run notepad as administrator (anything launched from administrative powershell instances will run like this).
In fact, if you enabled developer mode on your computer there's a registry key that gets set to run notepad as admin, it's: `runas /savecred /user:PC-NAME\Administrator “notepad %1”` in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT-> * -> shell -> runas (new folder) -> (Default)
And, if I'm not totally mistaken, notepad also has the ability to reopen files as administrator, but I don't remember how to invoke it.
Regardless, notepad is a very trusted application and is often run as Administrator. Often it's more trusted than any other utility to modify system files.
3 replies →
Now imagine that there are people who want to embed video players and image viewing in the terminal :D.
I'm not sure if we should use "gold standard" together with the little piece of garbage that notepad.exe was for most of its existence. It has been the bane for anyone who had to do work on locked down Windows servers and had to, e.g., edit files with modern encodings. They fixed some of it in the meantime, but the bitter taste remains.
You do have a point, because it shows an unfortunate inflation in words. That said, on a fresh windows install, notepad was usually an island of stability in a sea of sorrow. The day I saw AI introduced to it, I knew the end is nigh.
When you have to edit text files on a locked down Windows server that are UTF-8 like everything else in the world and your only tool is notepad.exe, it's the island of pain.
You goto go with the times man, goto write yourself a fulltime job with a legacy.
tell this to level N-1 managers that want to get promoted by the only way of "launching features"
A utility meant for viewing data? I don't think you understand what a text editor is.
I'd agree that recent features feel a bit unnecessary, but it does need to edit and write files - including system ones (going through however that is authorised). You could sandbox a lot of apps with limited impact, but it would make a text editor really useless. Least privilege principles work best when you don't need many privileges.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say. You could always edit system files with notepad, that was something that the program always excelled at thanks to its simplicity in both how it looked and behaved. And i fail to see the new features as anything but useless bloat.
They should have called it Emacs. Then everybody would have known.