Security: Our own reporter Matt Hines appeared on the radio show Homeland Security Inside & Out, discussing his article about herd intelligence and malware. “The idea of herd intelligence is to essentially turn the end-point into a monitoring station for new viruses and to report them back to antivirus vendors to help them keep an eye on the latest and greatest attacks. It’s a very new idea.” Mr. Hines is the first to be interviewed, and other guests include none other than the man who conquered smallpox. Related: Herd intelligence benefits IT security. Notes from the field: Robert X. Cringely is singing today, and the tune is Happy Birthday — to Windows Vista. “It was one year ago today that Microsoft foisted Windows Vista onto a wary world. (OK — OEMs and enterprises had Vista foisted on them in November 2006, but January was the ‘big launch’ for most of us,” Cringe writes. Recall Microsoft’s “The wow starts now” slogan, but Cringe asserts that in hindsight, “January 30,2007 was more like the ‘When Started Then.'” Happy Birthday Vista? Microsoft claims roughly four out of ten new machines shipped with Vista, but back in XP’s first year it shipped in nearly 70 percent of PCs. “Microsoft has finally figured out what it takes to earn respect for one of its operating systems: release a new one that sucks harder than the last.” Related: Save Windows XP. Sign the petition. The news beat: ICANN considers a proposal to stop domain tasting, the seedy practice of purchasing thousands of domain names and watching to see which ones get searched for in hopes of then selling those to the interested party at a profit. Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center, aka SLAC, adopts Sun’s datacenter-in-a-box for extra capacity. And SAP’s profit drops 6 percent for the fourth quarter, a loss the company attributes to new offerings. Show of the week: Demo 2008 Tomorrow’s tech today. Demo’s got 77 demonstrators all vying for VC and investment funding for what they hope will become the next big thing. (Full Disclosure: Demo is owned by IDG World Expo, the parent company of InfoWorld.) Security