Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is finally releasing a “delete history” feature, which will wipe out the last 15 minutes of search queries, for the Android Google Search app. “Delete history” was announced at Google I/O 2021 in May and made it to the iOS app two months later, but for some reason, it took almost a year to come to Android. It’s finally rolling out now, though, according to a statement Google gave to The Verge over the weekend.

If you want to wipe out the last few minutes of your search history, open the Google Search app via the app icon (other entry points, like the search bar widget, won’t bring up the right UI), tap on your profile picture in the top right and you should see a new “delete last 15 minutes” option at the top of the pop-up menu. If you don’t see the setting yet, try swiping the app away in recent apps and opening it again, which will load the newest configuration from the cloud.

Wiping out your search history is sort of like wiping out browser history, but Google stores search history to your account in the cloud. As the app explains, Google Search history tracks “the things you search for, results you click, and stories you read” while using the Google app or Google.com. Google also captures your location, plus audio recordings if you run a voice search. The search terms are used to show more relevant ads, of course, but also for future search predictions and to display content in Google Discover.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with head of Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin during a flight to the Vostochny Cosmodrome on September 4, 2021. (credit: ALEXEY DRUZHININ/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

The fate of the International Space Station hangs in the balance as tensions between Russia and the West escalate following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

However, given that the conflict is now nearly a month old and the old laboratory is still flying high, it appears that the partnership among Russia, the United States, and 13 other nations will continue to hold. This article will consider the future of the partnership from three different dimensions: technical, legal, and political. It starts with the solid premise, repeated over and over by NASA officials, that the United States wants to continue flying the International Space Station through at least 2024.

The real question about the near-term future of the International Space Station, therefore, is whether Russia wants to continue flying it. The answer is “probably yes.”

Enlarge / Portal 2 is one of the games Google recommends trying. (credit: Google)

After prematurely announcing that Steam on Chromebooks was ready for testing last week, Google is making the release official today. The alpha version of Steam on Chrome OS is currently available in the Chrome OS 14583.0.0 Dev channel, as announced via a post in Google’s Chrome Developers Community.

Not all Chromebooks will be able to run Steam, however. Google said only the following machines can try the alpha:

• Acer Chromebook 514 (CB514-1W)
• Acer Chromebook 515 (CB515-1W)
• Acer Chromebook Spin 713 (CP713-3W)
• Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 (CX5500)
• Asus Chromebook CX9 (CX9400)
• HP Pro c640 G2 Chromebook
• Lenovo 5i-14 Chromebook

“Because many games have high performance demands, we’ve focused our efforts thus far on a set of devices where more games can run well,” Google said.

Enlarge / Repairing an Apple iPhone. (credit: Patrick Pleul/picture alliance)

Under CEO Tim Cook’s watchful eye, Apple has become famous for its tightly managed supply chain. Yet even the most finely tuned machines run into problems from time to time. The case of Dhirendra Prasad appears to be one of those times. 

Prasad’s time at Apple coincided with the company’s meteoric rise. He joined in 2008, just after the iPhone was released, and spent the next decade there as a buyer in the company’s Global Service Supply Chain group, which sources repair parts from a range of vendors.

During that time, Prasad devised a scheme with two other men, Robert Gary Hansen and Don M. Baker, who owned vendors that Apple worked with, the Department of Justice says.

Enlarge / Windows 11 running on an old Windows 7-era HP laptop. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Windows 11 has stricter system requirements than any Windows version before it, dropping support for a wide range of pre-2018 PCs in the name of improving the Windows platform’s security baseline. You can work around these requirements to install Windows 11 on unsupported PCs relatively easily, but Microsoft added warnings to its installer and threatened to withhold updates from these systems. So far, the company hasn’t followed through on that threat. But using Windows 11 on these somewhat older computers is about to get more annoying.

A new Windows 11 update adds a “system requirements not met” watermark to the desktop of unsupported PCs, similar to the watermark you might see if you were running an early beta or unactivated version of Windows. The screenshot below is from a PC that supports TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot but uses an unsupported 6th-generation Intel Core CPU.

The watermark you’ll begin seeing on unsupported PCs. A similar “requirements not met” message will also appear in the Settings app. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

This message will presumably appear when your PC doesn’t meet one or more of the operating system’s core security requirements: a supported Intel, AMD, or ARM processor; Secure Boot support; and TPM 2.0 hardware or firmware. This means it may also appear for users of PCs that are fully capable of meeting Windows 11’s requirements, but they have Secure Boot or their TPM turned off either by accident or on purpose (many motherboard BIOSes came with one or both disabled by default for years, though recent updates have changed those settings).

Enlarge / Don’t bother me, I’m busy evolving. (credit: Indrek Lainjärv / EyeEm)

When we think of evolution, we often think of slow, gradual changes made over millions of years. However, new research suggests that the process could be happening quite quickly, driving major changes over the course of a single year in response to seasonal changes.

The paper describing that research was released last week and studies evolution in fruit flies over around 10 generations, with each generation of flies spanning less than a dozen days. While fruit flies are notoriously short-lived, and the distance between their generations is tiny, evolution could be happening quicker than previously anticipated even in longer-lived organisms, according to Seth Rudman, assistant professor in the school of biological sciences at Washington State University and one of the authors of the paper.

“Over the last few decades there has been a growing appreciation that evolution can occur fairly rapidly,” he told Ars.