TechDigest daily roundup: Elon Musk ‘no choice’ but to slash Twitter staff

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk says he had “no choice” but to slash the company’s workforce as the firm is losing more than $4m (£3.5m) a day. Half of the company’s staff are being let go, a week after Mr Musk bought Twitter in a $44bn (£38.7bn) deal. Twitter staff have been using the platform to talk about their dismissal. There are concerns Twitter could water down content moderation but Mr Musk said the firm’s policies remain “absolutely unchanged”. BBC 

Data collected on Uber drivers’ smartphones could help monitor bridges and stop them from collapsing, a new study suggests. Collecting drivers’ GPS location and acceleration data – both automatically recorded by ridesharing apps like Uber – give structural engineers key insights into a bridge’s health, according to the research. It would provide them with almost constant real-time monitoring of a bridge’s robustness and potentially reduce the number of deadly collapses. Sky News 

A deployment of facial recognition cameras in London led to just a handful of arrests despite taking the biometric data of thousands of people, new figures show. According to a freedom of information request obtained by the Standard, five deployments of live facial recognition cameras in Oxford Circus from February 27, 2020 to July 16, 2022, resulted in an estimated 125,786 faces which were scanned by the Met Police. Despite the large number of faces scanned by the cameras, only nine arrests were made over the course of the five operations. Yahoo!

The first reviews of the new Apple TV 4K were published this morning with an overwhelmingly positive consensus. One interesting tidbit revealed in these reviews is that the Apple TV 4K has another trick up its sleeve coming with a future software update: better support for variable refresh rates. According to reviews from The Verge and TechCrunch, a future update to tvOS will add support for something called Quick Media Switching, commonly referred to as QMS VRR. This is a feature of HDMI 2.1 that wasn’t supported by previous Apple TV models and is also still not supported by TVs themselves with HDMI 2.1. 9to5Mac 

A hedge fund billionaire has posted a job for an “iPad butler” to look after his family’s gadgets. Chris Rokos, whose firm is one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, wants a VIP support engineer to provide “day-to-day technical support for a senior member of our Partnership Board, spanning both their professional and personal lives and that of their family”. The LinkedIn advert, which did not contain a salary, called for a person whose role will see them “own all home entertainment services” and give “support for a senior member of our partnership board and their family”. LBC

Matter has officially launched, with smart home brands announcing their first Matter-certified devices at a launch event in Amsterdam. The new IoT (internet of things) protocol is the culmination of years of collaborative work to allow developers around the world to create smart home devices that will work seamlessly together. Among the first certified devices are products from Nanoleaf, Eve and Schneider Electric. The protocol was developed by a coalition of 300 companies under the aegis of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), including the big four tech brands: Apple, Amazon, Samsung and Google. Tech Advisor