Remember when Notepad was just… Notepad? A simple text editor nobody asked to be modernized?
Yeah, Microsoft didn’t care either. They bolted on Markdown support and AI features anyway. And now we’ve got CVE-2026-20841. Remote code execution. Via a text file. This is the kind of thing that makes you go “oh come on, really?”
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.
A few months ago (maybe a year) I found myself in a situation where I had to uninstall and re-install the native Calculator to Windows because of some error. How in the hell did they mess up a calculator? Well the same way they probably messed up the closest thing we have to pencil and paper on Windows.