[usrbinbash]

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.

[MarleTangible]

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.

[delecti]

They didn't need to create a new app. At the same time that they started adding LLM garbage to Notepad, they discontinued WordPad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad#Change_in_deve... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPad#Discontinuation

They likely knew nobody would be drawn to WordPad by the additions, so they had to scavenge their rapidly diminishing list of actually useful software for sacrifices on the altar to their outrageous AI investments.

[Ntrails]

How long were they threatening to kill snipping tool despite it being a perfectly serviceable piece of kit so we could switch to some shitty alternative?

[d3Xt3r]

They did ultimately kill it though - and then they re-created it as a bloated UWP version that is an insane 449 MEGABYTES in size! The old win32 Snipping Tool used to be only a few kilobytes...

[mghackerlady]

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

[Aachen]

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

[breppp]

> 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

[bsza]

What counts as "large"? I'm pretty sure at some point in my life I'd opened the entirety of Moby Dick in Notepad. Unless you want to look for text in a binary file (which Notepad definitely isn't for) I doubt you'll run into that problem too often.

Also, I hope the irony of you citing Notepad++ [1] as what Notepad should aim to be isn't lost on you. My point being, these kinds of vulnerabilities shouldn't exist in a fucking text editor.

[1] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-up...

[vel0city]

> What counts as "large"?

Remote into a machine that you're not allowed to copy data out of. You only have the utilities baked into Windows and whatever the validated CI/CD process put there. You need to open a log file that has ballooned to at least several hundred megabytes, maybe more.

Moby Dick is about 1MB of text. That's really not much compared to a lot of log files on pretty hot servers.

I do agree though, if we're going to be complaining about how a text editor could have security issues and pointing to Notepad++ as an example otherwise, its had its own share of notable vulnerabilities even before this update hijacking. CVE-2017-8803 had a code execution vulnerability on just opening a malicious file, this at least requires you to click the rendered link in a markdown file.

[bsza]

Oh right, generated files exist. Though logging systems usually have a rollover file size you can configure, should this happen to you in real life.

Honestly I'm okay with having to resort to power tools for these edge cases. Notepad is more for the average user who is less likely to run into 100 MB text files and more likely to run into a 2 kB text file someone shared on Discord.

[JCattheATM]

> Notepad is more for the average user who is less likely to run into 100 MB text files and more likely to run into a 2 kB text file someone shared on Discord.

There's no reason it shouldn't handle both use cases.

[vel0city]

> Though logging systems usually have a rollover file size you can configure, should this happen to you in real life

I get what you're saying. But if things were done right I probably wouldn't have to be remoting into this box to hunt for a log file that wasn't properly being shipped to some other centralized logging platform.

[breppp]

I know about the vulnerabilities in notepad++, however I was referring to the feature set.

Regarding large, I am referring to log files for example. I think the issue was lack of use of memory mapped files, which meant the entire file was loaded to RAM always, often giving the frozen window experience

[Romario77]

Notepad++ might be too much for a simple utility.

Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

And you could see how adding new things adds vulnerabilities. In this case they added ability to see/render markdown and with markdown they render links, which in this case allowed executing remote code when user clicks on a link.

[breppp]

> Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.

Wordpad was the bundled rich text editor and was also a mess

I don't think an improved notepad could have cannibalized Word

[vbezhenar]

notepad.exe worked just fine.

Notepad++ is a monster software.

[hulitu]

> t couldn't load a large text file for one, its search was barely functional, had funky issues with encoding, etc.

It was working according to the spec. Which is very unusual in the SW world.