LINKBLOG for January 20, 2005

• Read Web 3.0. In which Zeldman talks about the current state of the web: his point seems to be that while we're at version 2.0 (as we are supposed to be now) everything is still glitter, glamour and technology rules. AJAX and other technologies are in the center, as opposed to putting the customer and his / her experience first. We will arrive at a more mature state only when we hit Web 3.0.
  
  My only question to that would be: who decides the version number of the web? Windows became a mature OS when it arrived at version 3.0 (or maybe you could say: 3.1), but there was a very clear desicion by Microsoft to call a certain version 3.0. Now that everyone babbles about web 2.0, nowhere we can see a version number. I could just as well talk about version 0.1.1 or something and it would have the same value..
  (via PPK, Elsewhere on the 'Net)
  



---



• Mark Russinovich has been doing his research again. This time the claim of Steve Gibson on Microsoft intentionally putting a backdoor in Windows a long time ago in the form of what has come to be known as the WMF Exploit. I have to say, I hae listened to Steve's podcast about the subject, but it seemed a bit absurd to me. I remember him from a couple years ago, introducing the 'raw sockets' issue: He predicted doom on the internet because Microsoft enabled these 'raw sockets' in Windows by default. Never heard anything about that either... more background here...
  
  Conclusion: you have to be very sure before you make these wild accusations toward a company like Microsoft. Given Gibson's track record and my intuition I follow Mark on this one!