Microsoft is planning to ship its next major version of Windows–known internally as version “7″–within roughly three years, CNET News.com has learned.

The company discussed Windows 7 on Thursday at a conference for its field sales force in Orlando, Fla., according to sources close to the company.

While the company provided few details, Windows 7, the next client version of the operating system, will be among the steps taken by Microsoft to establish a more predictable release schedule, according to sources. The company plans a more “iterative” process of information disclosure to business customers and partners, sources said.

Hi-tech criminals have found novel ways to carry out web-based attacks that are much harder to spot and stop, warn security experts.

Some cyber criminals have exploited file-sharing networks and popular webpages to attack targets.

The malicious hackers have turned to these methods instead of going to the trouble of hijacking home PCs.

Using these methods the hi-tech criminals have staged some of the biggest attacks security experts have ever seen.

Poker champion Phil Laak has a good chance of winning when he sits down this week to play 2,000 hands of Texas Hold’em — against a computer.

It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they’re good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.

But it’s only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player.

“This match is extremely important, because it’s the first time there’s going to be a man-machine event where there’s going to be a scientific component,” said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer.

The Canadian university’s games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn’t let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.

Earlier this week, Microsoft Windows watcher Winbeta.org posted an e-mail from the software giant’s Windows Driver Kit team that ended up launching a media feeding frenzy on news sites around the world. According to Microsoft’s e-mail to the site, the release of a beta version of the first service pack for Vista was available for download.

The resulting avalanche of press reports from around the globe forced Microsoft to clarify the report by saying that the earlier e-mail was actually designed to announced the availability of the beta of Windows Server 2008 instead of Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), and that the confusion was due to a typo.

Michael Silver, research vice president in Gartner’s Client Computing group, said that although Vista SP1 is not yet ready to roll, the sooner Microsoft releases it, the sooner businesses that look at SP1 as an important milestone will start adopting Vista.

If Microsoft gets SP1 out this year, he said, it could buy Microsoft an extra quarter of adoption in businesses, Silver explained. “That may not fuel a lot of extra revenue, but it helps improve the perception of Vista,” he noted.

For some security researchers who uncover flaws in leading computer programs, a nod of appreciation from software companies is no longer enough. Now they want money.

Critics say the purity of research is in jeopardy as discoveries are shopped around instead of submitted directly to software vendors so they can quickly develop a fix.

“I don’t like there being an incentive to turn this into a market,” said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer for security company BT Counterpane. “Then you create incentives for the bad guys to start finding this stuff and selling it, and if the bad guys charge more, the good guys have to charge more.”

Some companies already have been offering payments for such information — hundreds or thousands of dollars depending the severity of the flaw — and a Swiss-based auction site opened this month to encourage bidding for such knowledge.

Software vendors so far have refrained from purchasing the information themselves, reluctant to encourage extortion — researchers holding out or threatening to sell to criminals unless they get the right price.