It’s rare that anyone at Microsoft talks publicly about Windows 7, the next version of Windows. It’s even rarer that anyone provides actual information about what might be inside the operating system, which is still in the planning stages.

However, Microsoft has posted a video of a recent university lecture given by Distinguished Engineer Eric Traut in which he talks about, among other things, a new, slimmed down kernel known as MinWin that was created as part of the Windows 7 development process.

The kernel, which lacks Vista’s bells and whistles or even a graphics system at all, takes up just 25MB on disk as compared with 4GB that the full Windows Vista takes up. And while people would need far more than MinWin to run even a basic Web server, Traut said it shows that Windows, at its heart, does not have to be a monster resource hog.

“That’s kind of proof that there is actually a nice little core inside of Windows,” Traut said. “A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system and that’s maybe a fair characterization, I have to admit. It is large. It contains a lot of stuff in it, but at its core, the kernel and the components that make up the very core of the operating system actually are pretty streamlined.”

Traut stressed that MinWin, though it uses the Windows 7 code base, probably won’t be used on its own.

Skype is expected to announce a deal soon with wireless service provider 3 to sell the Internet telephony company’s first mobile phone, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Skype plans to introduce the phone in the countries where 3 operates, the source said, without giving a timeframe or saying where the phone would be sold first.

3 is the mobile venture of Hong Kong’s Hutchison Whampoa Ltd (0013.HK) and operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Austria, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Sweden and United Kingdom.

Skype spokesman Chaim Haas confirmed that 3 and Skype “are working together on a new product to make Skype completely mobile,” but declined to give full details.

Skype is expected to reveal its plans in the last week of October, the source said.

Flickr plans to expand from photo sharing to photo editing through a deal with start-up Picnik, a major change in the nature of the Yahoo site.

“We are working on a relationship with Picnik, which will be available in the coming months,” a Flickr representative said Friday, declining to share further details.

Wal-Mart’s lawyers have an early holiday message for Web sites that post “Black Friday” ads ahead of their official release date: Don’t do it.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Friday that its lawyers have sent letters to the Web sites, saying publishing the ads before their official November 19 release date violates Wal-Mart’s copyrights and other rights.

“Such violations can give rise to liabilities and severe legal penalties,” said the letter, posted on the bfads.net Web site. “To the extent that the methods of acquisition or use include criminal activity, criminal penalties may also apply.”

November 19 is just four days before “Black Friday,” the day after the Thanksgiving Day holiday when shoppers throng to stores looking for deep discounts that retailers use as a lure to get the key holiday sales season off to a strong start.

But more and more of the advertising circulars retailers put out a few days ahead of “Black Friday” have found their way to Web sites weeks in advance instead.

“When that sort of thing happens, it’s hard for our customers to tell whether (the ads) are accurate or not,” said Gail Lavielle, a spokeswoman for Sears Holdings Corp. “We can’t vouch for them if we haven’t actually placed them.”

Wal-Mart has asked these web sites not to post the ads in the past, but the ads have still been posted, said John Simley, a spokesman for the world’s largest retailer.

Mozilla Corp. has released a critical security update to Firefox, taking a third shot at patching bugs in the way the browser can be used to launch programs from Web links.

The bug, rated ‘moderate’ by Mozilla, lies in the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) protocol handling technology that is used to launch programs– an e-mail client for example– from within the browser. Over the past few months, security researchers have been discovering an increasing number of ways that this technology can be misused, often as a way to install unauthorized software on a victim’s computer.

The URI patch is one of eight security bug-fixes that Mozilla has pushed out with the 2.0.0.8 update, released late Thursday.

Philadelphia is home to the least attractive people in the United States, a survey of visitors and residents showed on Friday.

The city of more than 1.5 million people was also found to be among the least stylish, least active, least friendly and least worldly, according to the “America’s Favorite Cities” survey by Travel & Leisure magazine and CNN Headline News.

About 60,000 people responded to the online survey — at www.travelandleisure.com — which ranked 25 cities in categories including shopping, food, culture, and cityscape, said Amy Farley, senior editor at the magazine.

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.