Comment by password4321
8 hours ago
I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month.
20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)
8 hours ago
I believe Markdown support is what led to CVE-2026-20841 earlier this month.
20260211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780451 Windows 11 January Update Breaks Notepad (60 points, 25 comments)
This is my favorite part of this story. Do you want remote code execution? Because [fixing things that aren't broken] is how you get remote code execution.
I thought it is by introducing an RCE vulnerability that you get an RCE vulnerability.
I'm being facetious of course, but this recent rhetorical trend of people confidently vouching for "pet" in "pet vs. cattle" is not a sustainable decision, even if it's admittedly plain practical on the short to medium run, or in given contexts even longer. It's just a dangerous and irresponsible lesson to blindly repeat I think.
Change happens. Evidently, while we can mechanistically rule out several classes of bugs now, RCEs are not one of those. Whatever additional guardrails they had in place, they failed to catch this *. I think it's significantly more honest to place the blame there if anywhere. If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad *, you can be confident they're introducing RCEs left and right to other components too **. With some additional contextual weighting of course.
* Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
** Under the interpretation that this was an RCE, which I question.
[0] https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2026/2/19/cve-2026-20...
> * Small note on this specific CVE though: to the extent I looked into it [0], I'm not sure I find it reasonable to classify it as an RCE. It was a UX hiccup, the software was working as intended, the intention was just... maybe not quite wise enough.
Most people seem to see "CVE" and "RCE" and assume the worst here. As you saw though, Notepad is just making totally valid URIs clickable! Web browsers allow it too - why is it not an RCE there? Sure, they usually show a warning when the URI is going to something external but most people just click through things like that anyway.
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Good point re: "RCE" though the CVSS score is 7.8/high severity; some more flavor per the FAQ at https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
> According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?
> The word Remote in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally.
> For example, when the score indicates that the Attack Vector is Local and User Interaction is Required, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.
> Change happens.
The low level tool that has served to rescue more systems than I can count does not need to "change" simply because "it happens, bro."
> while we can mechanistically
You can rule it out with process as well. As in "don't change what isn't broken."
> If they can introduce an RCE to Notepad
Then they clearly feel they have no viable competition. This is table stakes. Getting it wrong should lose you most of your customer base overnight. Companies actually used to _work_ this way.
Meanwhile TextEdit on Mac always rendered HTML. Which seems useless until you realize it can also edit and save as HTML. So there's casually a wysiwyg web editor built into macOS that idk how many people use.
idk maybe TextEdit DOES have some rce not discovered yet?
maybe we should separate "real origianl text-only editor" from "fancy text editor"?
windows already got wordpad... why even lay a finger on textpad?
Well this is what we call it opportunity cost
I think it's more likely that Microsoft is vibe coding slop garbage to replace their core apps that were literally better.
Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
It also signals the death knell for Windows native apps. Microsoft can't make them anymore. It won't be long until even Excel is a Electron sloplication.
> Windows 10 explorer.exe is 100x faster than Windows 11 explorer, it's not even close.
I have a hard time believing this. I'm pretty sensitive to performance losses and I haven't noticed any difference between those. It wouldn't make sense either, given they should both host the same shell icon views. Are you sure the difference you're seeing is in explorer.exe? As opposed to something else, like a new shell extension or a new filesystem filter driver on Windows 11?
6 replies →
The best example is probably the new "Outlook", and I put that name in quotes intentionally.
4 replies →
It's been so weird to watch over the decades as team sizes, budgets, and timelines have exploded even as we've abandoned once-normal things like native GUI applications as too hard in favor of "more efficient" webshit... even as the aforementioned stuff with growing team sizes, budgets, and timelines have happened.
7 replies →
It was already true that an attacker could trick a user into copying a malicious link inside a file opened in Notepad to their browser, was that also a Remote Code Execution Vulnerability?
You can trick the user into copying the same malicious link, but browsers have generally already implemented the same mitigation that is Microsoft's fix for this issue inside Notepad (specifically, prompting before opening outside applications after the user enters or clicks a URL that isn't one of the built-in schemes).
It is also possible to use a different application as the http and file: url handler at the os level;
Write an app to display the (URL) argument passed and require the user to confirm or reject before running the browser using any of one or more default and configurable command line templates.
Add a "Install as default http, https, file:// uri handler" button in the settings gui. Prompt the user to install the app as default handler on first run.
Add opt-in optional debug logging of at least: {source_app_path:, url:, date_opened: } to a JSON lines log file
It looks like the exploit would cause notepad to retrieve and execute arbitrary code when a malicious link is clicked.
The worst part of enshittification is all these search tools erring on the side of too many results than not enough.
I believe notepad was originally just a demo of the multi line edit control. Feature creep.