Even Microsoft Notepad Is Getting AI Text Editing Now 78
Microsoft is introducing a feature to Notepad called Rewrite that will let you use AI to "rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content." The Verge reports: If you're a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text -- for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.
It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.
It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.
Nope to Microsoft Accounts (Score:5, Insightful)
Still not interested in using a Microsoft account on my computer.
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There is one real, concrete benefit.
If you use only local accounts, and I have physical access to your computer, I can log in with administrator permissions in about 3 minutes. https://www.howtogeek.com/962/... [howtogeek.com] I can then reset your password and log in to *your* account and impersonate you.
If you use a Microsoft account, this attack is effectively thwarted, because you can't reset someone's Microsoft account without a texted confirmation code or authenticator app.
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FDE
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Yeah, BitLocker works too, as long as you set it to require a PIN. If you use the default settings, which bypass the PIN, you're still hosed. Very few people enable this feature, but fine, maybe you do.
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The first step of that article involves already being logged in and opening an administrator level command prompt.
So you need not just physical access, you need an unlocked session with an account that can open an admin command prompt without requiring the user's password again.
It's no different to a Linux machine where you are already logged in as someone with access to a root/sudo terminal.
BTW, Windows key + L to lock your computer when you get up from your desk. Thwarts this attack.
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The article didn't discuss this, but on Windows, if you have a USB stick with a Windows installer on it, you can boot from the USB stick and make Registry changes from that "repair" session. So you don't actually have to start with Admin permissions.
https://answers.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
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Only if the drive isn't encrypted, and the default is to encrypt it.
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The default is encrypted, but doesn't require you to enter a pin or password. So if you turn it on, the drive automatically decrypts data as it is read. That whole-disk encryption only protects against removal of the hard drive; the keys to the encryption are stored on the system itself, making it still susceptible to enabling the default administrator account.
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But it doesn't decrypt if you boot from a USB drive, because the automatic key release is tied to the OS and the Secure Boot chain of trust.
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While this is true, you can disable secure boot (as you must in order to install Windows) by going to the BIOS settings on startup. Almost _nobody_ sets a password on their BIOS settings.
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You don't need to disable secure boot to install Windows. In fact your definitely shouldn't, it prevents certain security measures being enabled.
Disabling secure boot won't decrypt the Windows drive. That would obviously be stupid. With secure boot disabled the TPM won't give up the key.
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You are correct, my mistake.
However, it *is* necessary to disable disk encryption in order to install a clean copy of Windows. Otherwise, the installer can't see the partitions and can't format the drive.
And for purposes of gaining access to the Administrator account, turning off disk encryption is straightforward and does work for that purpose. When you're done, it's possible to re-enable disk encryption.
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That's not correct either, if you are doing a fresh install and keeping nothing you can install Windows on an encrypted drive. It will just wipe everything that was there previously. You only need to decrypt it if you want to save the data.
Turning off disk encryption requires administrator access, obviously.
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I disagree, having just gone through this in the last few weeks.
But all of this is kind of beside the point. The way *most* computers are configured, if I have physical access to the machine, I can impersonate you in a matter of minutes, *unless* you are using a Microsoft account.
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I don't think that's right at all, the default configuration for the vast majority of Windows machines prevents the attack you describe.
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There is one real, concrete benefit.
If you use only local accounts, and I have physical access to your computer, I can log in with administrator permissions in about 3 minutes. https://www.howtogeek.com/962/... [howtogeek.com] I can then reset your password and log in to *your* account and impersonate you.
If you use a Microsoft account, this attack is effectively thwarted, because you can't reset someone's Microsoft account without a texted confirmation code or authenticator app.
On business computers and travelers (laptops), this matters. If you get to my personal computer to do this, I've got far bigger issues than you playing with my digital bits. It never leaves the house.
Return Wordpad without AI (Score:3)
That's all I need for 99% of my writing,
Not interested in data collection and monetization (Score:2)
The federal government or California needs to get involved and pass regulations that the state government owned Windows machines can be easily setup without buying a more expensive version of Windows to not phone home, collect profile data, send data to the cloud, call out to an AI service.
The regulations should also apply to consumer or commercial purchased copies of Windows sold in their state/country.
Notepad was fine as it was (Score:5, Insightful)
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I didn't even have to do that much. Adapted from https://www.winhelponline.com/... [winhelponline.com]:
1. Go to Settings -> Apps -> Advanced app settings -> App execution aliases
2. Scroll down to the Notepad entry and switch it off.
3. Press Win-R, type in "notepad," and hit Enter to verify that the OG Notepad is back.
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It's not that bad. The tabs are actually useful.
I use Notepad++ anyway, but the new Notepad is hardly bloated. It still opens in milliseconds and spell checking wasn't too much of a burden on my old 68000 based Amiga, let alone a modern PC. It also handles non-Windows line endings now too.
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I just install notepad++ and use that instead. Having said that I always found notepad to be one of the best Microsoft programs. For two reasons.
1) You could paste text off the clipboard and remove all formatting (which I would only want about 2% of the time) and ...
2) It didn't try and "help" with anything - unlike all their other crap which constantly interrupt what you're doing with unwanted popups, nags and other crap then tries to force crappy, unwanted formatting on everything you type.
As for "AI"
They (Score:3)
>"Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text"
Perhaps the sentence, above, should have been run through this AI grammar-checking thing. "You" and "they"/"their" don't match.
Re: They (Score:1)
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There's no need for thinking or decision making anymore as freedom will be replaced with Project 2025. Bunch of stupid, conforming robots with no free will, that's what the MAGots want. A sterile, authoritarian, no fun world to appease their psychotic and hate filled sky daddy figure.
Wait ,did I say "no fun"? Modern versions of witch burnings are fun, aren't they?
Why can't anyone write in 2024? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems we reached the end of 2024 and everyone forgot that they could come up with a series of words without help. Do you all have such a low opinion of your own skills that you'd rather trust software that is designed to fabricate words?
Saw someone just today on LinkedIn complaining that they paid a pro to write their resume, "one of the best in the business", and was not getting responses. Someone finally got back to the guy to tell him his resume is crap. This person is applying for Management positions, and is not confident enough to write his own resume. Sorry, AI is not going to save you after you've given up on yourself.
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Seems we reached the end of 2024 and everyone forgot that they could come up with a series of words without help. Do you all have such a low opinion of your own skills that you'd rather trust software that is designed to fabricate words?
Saw someone just today on LinkedIn complaining that they paid a pro to write their resume, "one of the best in the business", and was not getting responses. Someone finally got back to the guy to tell him his resume is crap. This person is applying for Management positions, and is not confident enough to write his own resume. Sorry, AI is not going to save you after you've given up on yourself.
I've gotten EXTREMELY frustrated with writer focused tools shoveling this shit at us. I write for fun. I've published a couple books, but mostly I just write stories I enjoy and can share with friends. Every tool focused on "the writing experience" or whatever dreck words marketing came up with to basically say, "Write what you want," has been inundated with AI bullshit. I mean, I get that they want to train AI on all the data, all the time, everywhere, but god damn just get out of my fucking way and let me
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Who uses Notepad? (Score:3)
There are a googol of other free text editors out there, who is going to bother with MS Notepad
I mostly use EditPad lite , but I do have a few others installed (Notepad++ , RJ Texted , the one that was EditBone )
I only ever registered on shareware text editor, and that was umpty years ago (UEdit on the Amiga)
What do you use?
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$ echo 'string' > file
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Butterflies. [xkcd.com]
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Joe's Own Editor [sourceforge.io]
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I use basic Notepad for quick edits. Anything more advanced like coding, I use Notepad++.
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Vim for the win.
Re: Who uses Notepad? (Score:2)
emacs - the OG bloatware
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Emacs. Org-novelist or org-roam enabled, depending on what I'm writing.
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When every problem is a nail (Score:4, Interesting)
So many of the products I use are now offering ways to re-write your prose. Do we really need all this revising for such minutiae? Do people write things in Notepad that need this help? Another tool I use daily, Confluence, the wiki authoring tool, is offering to rewrite my pages. But my wiki pages (and I expect Iâ(TM)m not alone) are filled with tables and various fragments, like bulleted lists. Rarely is there a paragraph of straight prose. And yet, because of the bubble, these AI tools are front-and-center in the ui.
I suspect as teams at tech companies have been commanded to find ways to expose AI, in any way possible, these are the things that naturally rise to the top, mainly because they are understandable, plausible, and possible. But, at the end of the day, they arenâ(TM)t really useful.
Please, let this bubble burst â" yesterday. Itâ(TM)s getting very tedious.
It reminds me of the blockchain bubble. Departments the world over were coming out with proofs-of-concept that were going to be âgame-changers.â(TM) Then people realized it wasnâ(TM)t terribly useful, and those little projects were quietly shelved. Thankfully.
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So many of the products I use are now offering ways to re-write your prose. Do we really need all this revising for such minutiae? Do people write things in Notepad that need this help? Another tool I use daily, Confluence, the wiki authoring tool, is offering to rewrite my pages. But my wiki pages (and I expect Iâ(TM)m not alone) are filled with tables and various fragments, like bulleted lists. Rarely is there a paragraph of straight prose. And yet, because of the bubble, these AI tools are front-and-center in the ui.
I suspect as teams at tech companies have been commanded to find ways to expose AI, in any way possible, these are the things that naturally rise to the top, mainly because they are understandable, plausible, and possible. But, at the end of the day, they arenâ(TM)t really useful.
Please, let this bubble burst â" yesterday. Itâ(TM)s getting very tedious.
It reminds me of the blockchain bubble. Departments the world over were coming out with proofs-of-concept that were going to be âgame-changers.â(TM) Then people realized it wasnâ(TM)t terribly useful, and those little projects were quietly shelved. Thankfully.
The mandate to shove this shit in our face is easy to understand. Everywhere you see access to AI, what it actually is is a data vacuum. It's sucking up everything you do to train the background processes. The tech company greed is going way beyond wanting money and tracking data. They want *EVERYTHING*. If they could figure out a way to tap into your brain and steal your dreams, they'd do it because THEY WANT EVERYTHING. For to train AI for to replace pesky h00mans.
AI is not about helping people gain anyth
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No. (Score:3)
Do not want.
Hi there! (Score:4, Funny)
MS don't seem to know how people use computers. (Score:5, Insightful)
No formatting.
No spell check.
No bloody AI crap.
I can't wait for this stupid "AI" bubble to burst.
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Add to it that if you use mixed languages the spell checker is always wrong. And the hell an autocorrect creates makes things worse.
Now don't get me started on "smart quotes" - that's something that comes from hell when you write software documentation.
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And yet Microsoft's Notepad still doesn't support common actions with the keyboard such as selecting multiple lines and indenting them all at once by pressing Tab, or moving them with Alt+Cursor up/down.
Notepad isn't used for typing prose (Score:2)
It's used to edit config files or other technical tasks. Nobody uses it to write...paragraphs. That's the domain of Word, or Google Doics, or email software.
I'm not sure this will get a lot of use. But then, maybe there are a few people out there who do use it for...writing.
Re: Notepad isn't used for typing prose (Score:2)
Hey if that Soderbergh fella was able to create an entire film using an iPhone, who knows what that other genius can come up with using the new Notepad Reloaded
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Yeah no doubt. But the thing is, people who want to write prose, don't even know that Notepad exists.
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I use it for writing, actually. Or rather, I use Notepad++ these days for it.
I prefer starting with an absolutely format-free version and then add the formatting in one go when I'm done.
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So it's not just me ! I got sick to death of Word (post 97) adding all sorts of crapulent formatting as I type (plus now resetting all my options after "updates") that I took this approach a couple of years ago.
Write document text in Notepad++, copy and paste text into Word. Select bit of text, format it, save as new style, apply style to similar parts of document etc. etc..
You still end up with quite a lot of crappy autogenerated Word styles but it's far, far, faster than trying to use Word !
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So...not Notepad.
Writers like you probably wouldn't be happy with "just" Notepad, I'd guess.
How many write prose in notepad? (Score:3)
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Word costs money, WordPad is gone, and Google Docs requires an active net connection and being logged into Google. Notepad is such a pleasant no-questions-asked does-one-thing kind of program - which again just goes towards this feature not being a good idea or beloved.
Clippy making its comeback soon? (Score:3)
All supercharged with AI and other hype thingies.
By when will the AI rewrite become obligatory? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The whole desktop computer industry seems hell bent on going down the "Fisher-Pricification" route for personal computers. "Hey, we know what you want to do with your PC, everyone wants the same thing". "You want social media, AI, chat, cat pictures, constantly moving UI's and constant popups telling you what to do". "That's what you want"
Imbeciles the lot of 'em. They're completely forgotten that the whole idea was that it's a "Personal Computer" where you install the programs YOU want, remove the progra
NOOOOOooooo (Score:1)
Thank Goodness Notepad++ Still Lives (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
iPhone AI can read it (Score:2)
Already required for Microsoft Office and any stand-alone software one purchased.
Is there a "mailto" action? Then someone's iPhone can read the email for them.
Damn bubbles (Score:3)
Can't we have at least ONE SIMPLE app (Score:2)
So...for any Bell Labs alumni... (Score:2)
AI is Pervasive Content-Stealing Virus (Score:2)
Once again microsoft confidently mistakes what fol (Score:1)
Every release they give us what they think we want. Every release theyâ(TM)re wrong.
They are so capable but lately so misguided.