The concepts of objects and ACLs are in the NT kernel itself. So things have worked like this on all windows versions built on the NT kernel: from WinNT 3.1, to

The concepts of objects and ACLs are in the NT kernel itself. So things have worked like this on all windows versions built on the NT kernel: from WinNT 3.1, to Win2k, ... to this day. Windows TCPIP stack has improved since then, but I'd be _very_ surprised if ReadFile didn't work on sockets on XP (or anything NT-based, actually). In any case, he's very rash to call out Windows when Linux has its share of special-purpose syscalls that do the "same" thing (e.g.: send, sendv, sendmsg, sendfile, sendmmsg, …) with myriads of options to alter their behavior.