Signal insists that plans to compel tech companies to scan devices for nude images of children announced by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday at London Tech Week “will not keep children safe.”

“It endangers us all,” the encrypted messaging platform said, adding that the mechanism required to implement it would be “dangerous.” And it wouldn’t be a pro-privacy statement without calling it “dystopian.”

Signal argues that the proposed technology could at some point be repurposed to enable state-sponsored surveillance of all citizens’ comms, or used as a mass censorship tool.

“Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition,” Signal stated. 

“We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider ‘threats’ or ‘harmful content.’”

Similar accusations have been leveled against the UK government in response to its various attempts to improve online safety via legislation.

For example, the government has long presented the Investigatory Powers Act as a way to enshrine in law necessary powers available to law enforcement and UK intelligence to intercept communications for the sake of preventing terrorist attacks.

More recently, the Online Safety Act was introduced to impose new obligations on digital platforms to prevent children from accessing online harms.

However, privacy proponents have shunned both.

Rather than simply providing powers to prevent terror attacks, critics say the IPA enables public bodies to spy on people’s calls or texts. It’s colloquially known as “The Snooper’s Charter.”

Digital rights organizations have also claimed the OSA is more about online censorship than it is about restricting the types of content children are allowed to view on the web.

The PM’s proposals are not law yet. Instead, Starmer’s speech amounted to a three-month ultimatum to tech companies: make the changes the UK wants to see or the government will legislate.

Essentially, whichever way the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others want to play it, some form of device-level scanning appears likely to be pushed onto UK devices soon.

“When it comes to the safety of our children, standing by is not an option. Nobody gets a free pass. That is why I’m making sure Britain is the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images,” Starmer said.

“And I expect tech firms to make that happen. This is not an impossible challenge – these are some of the most innovative companies in the world. But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law.”

The government’s announcement was backed by a slew of campaigners and charities that argued child protection has not been as big a part of tech innovation as it should have been in recent years.

Roxy Longworth, author and founder of Behind Our Screens, said: “I told myself, back in 2021, that if I went public with what happened to me and it stopped one life from being ruined, then it was worth it, but the more I campaigned the angrier I became. 

“Every child needs to be protected from platforms who for far too long have been allowed to turn a blind eye to the damage being done to them. This announcement makes me hopeful that there won’t be kids sat in their room feeling the same pressure and shame that consumed my teenage years.”

Likewise, Chris Sherwood, chief exec at the NSPCC, said: “Every day these protections are not in place, more children will continue to face devastating harm in the online world. That’s why we strongly support the government’s decision to make it mandatory for these companies to block inappropriate material at device level. This marks a major step forward in our fight against online child sexual abuse.”

The UK government singled out Apple and Google, saying that it demands both block nudity by default across their devices. That includes cameras, third-party apps, and messaging services, which would prevent children from taking, viewing, or sending nude images.

It proposed that the nude-block-by-default approach would keep children safe, while still allowing adults to remove the block by verifying their ages.

Client-side scanning remains a highly controversial technology, but supporters present it as striking a balance between privacy and safety.

Advocates argue it should appeal to the pro-privacy crowd by keeping all data on the device, rather than blurring nude images in transit, for example, which would involve sending that data to an intermediary.

However, in the case of Signal, an encrypted messenger, it breaks the private comms trust model, even if the message content is not sent to a third party.

Client-side scanning can involve checking content against a database of known objectionable material. In the context of child exploitation, image hashes would be checked against a database of other hashes associated with abuse material. If the hashes match, then the image would be blocked.

Some implementations scan using AI, rather than against a database.

So while the image in this scenario is not sent to a third party, it does mean that Signal could no longer say that message content stays between sender and receiver only.

Further, because the databases of objectionable material would need to be updated, this introduces additional problems. 

Updated databases or models would need to be pushed to devices, creating another trust and security dependency. The attack surface also widens, as it is conceivable that attackers could try to manipulate them.

As Signal points out, it would be technically possible for the same scanning mechanisms to be updated to block other things, like messages criticizing the government, to take one hypothetical example.

Authorities could also feasibly implement ways of seeing which device contains images or other content that has registered matches with its objectionable material database, potentially opening the door to surveillance.

The company’s statement [PDF] called for public funds to be funneled into other areas to improve child safety, including education, social services, and guardrails on AI technologies and platforms, instead of drafting legislation to block children’s nudes by default on devices.

“What the UK government wants instead is invisible surveillance infrastructure, switched on by default and potentially rushed into law under cynical pretexts,” it said. “All of this with scant care for the actual needs of the children they claim to be protecting or the horrifying and far-ranging consequences that will ensue in practice.”

Signal has not threatened to pull out of the UK, however, despite the government’s promises to enact the plans, via legislation or the threat of it.

The company has previously mulled exiting Sweden over proposed encryption-busting laws, and more recently Canada, as it debates a bill that would compel platforms like Signal to gather its users’ metadata, which could include their locations and who they are talking to. ®

‘I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well’, Srinivas says, referring to the AI giants that recently filed to go public.

US AI start-up Perplexity has plans to go public in 2028 regardless of the reception of OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs, the company’s co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on 8 June.

“Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028. So, that’s still remains the case,” he told the publication. Though he added that it is “important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well”.

Srinivas’ comments come as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX all applied to go public within days of each other. Estimates place Elon Musk’s company SpaceX as the front runner in the IPO race with a targeted raise of $75bn at a $1.75trn valuation. While Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to be valued at around $1trn post listing.

“I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well… SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be like a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out.”

In a filing last month, SpaceX, for the first time, revealed its loss-making financial standing, reporting a net loss of $4.28bn on revenue of $4.69bn for Q1, compared with a net loss of $528m on revenue of $4bn a year ago. The company places its valuation at roughly 110-times its sales, with some analysts cautioning against its seemingly lofty expectations for growth.

“SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be like a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out,” Srinivas said, but added that he believes the companies will do well in their public rounds.

“We are very happy for their success, because their success means they’ll be able to invest more into frontier model development. And every time AI gets better, Perplexity gets better,” he said.

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that competes with the likes of Google (and its newly revamped AI Search), and AI-powered browsers such as OpenAI’s Atlas. It was last valued at $20bn following a $200m round last September.

The start-up’s browser Comet orchestrates across its competitors by scraping the internet to provide conversational answers to search queries.

Earlier this year, the company launched ‘Computer’, an AI agent that acts as a general-purpose “digital worker”.

“Computer takes a goal, like build a website, analyse a dataset, or research a market and builds and runs the entire workflow to deliver it, working on its own for hours or even months,” Perplexity explained.

“We actually want competition and progress on all levels, be it frontier or local models and open source, and that will position us really differently from the rest and position us well to go for an IPO like one or two years down the line,” Srinivas told the publication.

“I think Google’s equity raise recently shows that the market wants to invest in AI frontier,” he added. Last year, Perplexity made an unsolicited $34.5bn offer to purchase Google’s Chrome browser. The deal did not materialise.

Perplexity has come under repeated legal threat from the likes of the BBC, New York Times, Wired, Forbes and even Amazon over alleged content scraping. Late last year, Amazon sued Perplexity, demanding the company’s AI browser agent Comet stop making purchases on behalf of users online.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare delisted Perplexity’s crawler from the 24m-some websites it protects over concerns that the bot engaged in stealth crawling tactics.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. Image: TechCrunch via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

More four-year-olds are enrolled in state-funded preschools than ever before, but the quality and availability of preschool programs have experts concerned about creating a system of haves and have-nots.

“If providing high-quality preschool education to all 3- and 4-year-olds were a race, some states are nearing the finish line, others have stumbled and fallen behind, and a few have yet to leave the starting line,” an annual report from the National Institute of Early Education Research states.

With the amount of funding and quality varying by state, it means that access for families in states that aren’t investing still widely varies.

The report, titled “State of Preschool: 2025 Yearbook,” breaks down the annual spending, quality and enrollment numbers across early childhood education programs in the U.S. The latest found states hit an all-time high for both spending and enrollment, but the quality of the programs remains a concern.

“We’re trying to make sure states are also thinking about quality,” Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at NIEER, says. “Right now, it’s more about access. And we don’t want them to forget about quality.”

More Funding – But Not Always More Quality

The report found funding peaked at nearly $14.4 billion, though that was largely driven by a handful of states: $4.1 billion in California alone, along with $1.2 billion in New Jersey and $1 billion in New York. Those three states accounted for nearly half (45 percent) of all state pre-K spending.

More than two dozen states also increased their preschool spending, which can go toward things like improving teacher-to-student rations and improving teacher compensation, the latter which has long been a concern.

While states still increased their spending on pre-K this year, the rate at which states are investing is slowing down. Adjusted for inflation, each state spent an average of $45 more per child than the 2023-2024 year. However, last year’s increase in spending was 16 times as large.

New Jersey, Oregon and the District of Columbia gave more than $15,000 in state funding per child enrolled in preschool. Six other states (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, New Mexico, and Washington) spent more than $10,000 per child enrolled in pre-K. Twenty eight states overall spent more funding per child, adjusted for inflation, than past years.

Seventeen states spent less on preschool in 2024-2025 than they did in 2023-2024, when adjusted for inflation. The researchers attributed the spending decline in part to overall state deficits and falling enrollment across many states.

However, that’s not always the case. New Jersey had a budget deficit but invested an additional $100 million into expanding preschool programs for all.

Pointing toward this, Steve Barnett, director of NIEER, argues that it’s all about state priorities: “That’s a conscious decision to say we’re going to spend less,” he says. “And you have to ask if the declining enrollment – even if not intentional – is a way to reduce spending [in the sector]. As opposed to, ‘Maybe we should work on getting parents to enroll their kid.’”

The boost in funding did not always correlate to better early childhood education programs. Only six states met all of NIEER’s 10 quality standards benchmarks, which includes a maximum class size of 20 students, a requirement that teachers have bachelor’s degrees and a classroom ratio of at least one staff member for every 10 students.

States looking to enhance preschool quality should focus on class size and teacher pay, Barnett argues.

Teacher pay and class sizes account for most of the money, and once states have improved those, other metrics, like curriculum supports and health screenings, are easier to pay for later, he adds.

But changes won’t happen overnight.

“It does take time. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have classroom size and teachers’ pay magically fixed,” Barnett says.

NIEER’s Friedman-Krauss, pointed to Alabama and Georgia as examples of slowly, but surely, increasing preschool quality. Georgia hit all 10 quality benchmarks this year. Friedman-Krauss credits the improvement to a $97.6 million investment by the state, which helped lower classroom size from 22 to 20 and increased teacher pay.

“We make a big deal of it because it’s serving most of the 4-year-old [children] and hitting all the benchmarks,” Barnett says. “It’s a state that lost them and came back even stronger; that’s a good sign.”

Lion’s Share of Enrollment Only in a Few States

Enrollment, similarly to funding, reached an all-time high nationally last year, with 1.8 million children during the 2024-2025 school year. But roughly half of that comes from four states: California, Texas, New York and Florida.

Notably, a dozen states had more than half of their four-year-olds in state-funded preschool programs, with the District of Columbia topping the list: 94 percent of four-year-olds were enrolled in their state programs. California’s enrollment gains were buoyed in part due to the state’s universal pre-K promise.

However, twenty states enrolled fewer preschoolers in 2024-2025 than the prior year. Some could blame the dip on declining birth rates. But when adjusted by population percentage, 21 states still saw a dip.

For some states, the enrollment decline was steep. Indeed, six states (Arizona, Florida, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin) decreased enrollment by more than 1,000 children.

Three-year-old students made up only 9 percent enrollment across the nation, up from 5 percent a decade earlier. Some states are acting to counter this. For example, Illinois and New Jersey are both focusing on expanding preschool programs for three-year-olds, Friedman-Krauss says. However, she and Barnett expect a slow mass adoption of three-year-olds in state-funded programs.

“I think there will be more attention paid to that group – how much more, that’s the hard part,” Barnett says. “Nine percent is better than when we started, but it’s very lumpy. It’s still 0 percent in lots of places.”

Apple briefed the EU on how Siri AI worked months ago and tried to find a compromise. The European Union stood firm and insisted keeping other vendors out of the new feature was illegal under the DMA.

Apple made the unusual step of taking time in the WWDC keynote to say that Siri AI would not be coming to the European Union. It was a public announcement aimed at blaming the EU for preventing users from getting the new iOS features.

Now Apple has stepped up its PR fight by detailing how it says the EU is intractable over its demand that would see privacy controls stripped away. Briefing journalists after the WWDC keynote, Greg Joswiak has revealed that Apple went further than ever before in attempting to negotiate with the European Commission.

According to French news site Numerama, Joswiak says Apple even revealed its plans for Siri AI to the EU at the start of 2026. Apple has reportedly never revealed plans so early before, but did so specifically to avoid the months of delays after the launch of live translation in AirPods Pro.

The issue concerns the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which demands that any rival that wants it, must have exactly the same access to iOS features as Apple. Launching Siri AI without rivals getting full access on day one would therefore be illegal.

“[So they] could read all your messages, edit your files, delete things, delete your photos, [and] take actions in your applications without you knowing or consenting,” said Joswiak, in translation. While a compromise was found for live translation, “[Siri AI is] much more complex and much more deeply integrated into the system.”

He argued that opening access to see what third-party firms do would mean putting users at risk. Joswiak called it the EU telling Apple to conduct an experiment on the millions of users in the region.

In an attempt to comply with the DMA yet preserve user privacy, Apple proposed adding a Trusted System Agent. This would be a mechanism that would allow rivals access to the same Siri AI functions, but let Apple maintain user security.

According to Apple, however, the European Commission rejected this. The company is describing this as “the most obvious example to date of the extreme interpretation of the DMA by the Commission.”

As yet, neither the European Union or the European Commission have commented publicly. Based on its most recent review of the DMA, however, the EU is unlikely to reverse its decision.

Apple and EU standoff

Back in May 2025, Apple appealed against the EU’s $570 million antitrust fine and for the first time went public with accusations of the company being ghosted.

Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of iOS, iPad and iPhone Marketing

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At the time, Apple spoke of having spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours on changes to comply with the EU. In the new report, though, Apple now says that it no longer knows what to work on.

So currently none of its engineers are working on adapting Siri AI to meet the EU’s demands. That means Apple is no longer budging, either.

Apple’s assumption that rival companies will exploit access and sell user data does seem to be well-founded. In 2024, for instance, it reported how Facebook owner Meta had filed requests for user data access that had nothing to do with its apps or their functions.

Based on that, the EU’s stance does appear to be disregarding the security and privacy of its people.

But with an apparent absolute refusal to consider Apple’s points, it could be years before EU users get Siri AI. If they ever get it at all.

Here’s one metric for tracking SpaceX’s IPO later this week: The company has changed the venture industry’s perspective on long-term, capital-intensive space so much that a talented founder with no space experience can fund a space data center company.

Orbital, a new firm that emerged in May from a16z’s startup accelerator program Speedrun with a $5 million seed round, is the latest company promising to do inference in space — just as soon as Starship is flying regularly. Other investors include Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Antler, Anti Fund, Ascent, Rubik, Zero Knowledge Ventures, LYVC, Feld Ventures, New Legacy, FNDR, UpHonest and Asterisk.

Founder and CEO Euwyn Poon previously founded e-scooter company Spin in 2017 and sold it to Ford a year later, joining the automotive giant. When he was ready to start a new company, a16z’s Speedrun was eager to get on board, according to partner Andrew Chen, who told TechCrunch that Poon worked through several ideas before landing on space data centers.

You’re familiar with the pitch. There’s insatiable demand for AI compute, and deploying it is slow going on Earth. Why not head to space for limitless sunshine and limited environmental reviews? The main problem is the brutal economics of launching stuff into orbit, which currently leaves the business case unable to close.

Orbital, like many of it competitors, is betting on SpaceX figuring out its Starship rocket and offering it to commercial customers. “We will get to full scale when Starship comes online,” Poon explained. The price of the Falcon 9, the current state of the art, “makes this not economically feasible.”

For now, Poon and company — which includes about a dozen folks in Los Angeles, with experience at Amazon LEO, SpaceX, and Northrop Grumman — are working toward a demo flight that will see the company fly an Nvidia Blackwell chip on a partner’s satellite to test Orbital’s radiation shielding and thermal management tech. In 2028, the company hopes to launch its first data-processing spacecraft with Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin-class GPUs.

At that point, the company wants to start doing piece-wise inference work, which would allow it to generate revenue with each satellite launched. That’s a similar path to rival data center start-up Starcloud, which already has a GPU in orbit and plans to launch several more to generate income until Starship enables them to deploy their full constellation.

Orbital’s goal is to deploy 10,000 satellites that provide a distributed gigawatt of computing power, with each satellite providing 100 kw of power. For comparison, Elon Musk said SpaceX expects its AI satellites produce up to 150 kw, and Starcloud expects to field larger 200 kw-rated spacecraft to run chips.

Some companies are too impatient to wait for Starship. Cowboy Space Company, another space data center startup backed by a16z, recently decided to start building its own rockets. Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin also announced plans to launch data centers into space using its New Glenn launch vehicle.

Poon is confident that the breadth of AI demand will allow many companies to succeed. “There’s so many lanes for companies in our space to pursue,” he told TechCrunch, before rattling off an array of choices that included companies pursuing different AI workloads, designs, and concepts of what an space data center looks like.

Chen said that Poon’s experience scaling up a company that deployed 250,000 scooters across 100 cities shows he can manage the tricky task of building an aerospace company. Over the long term, a project like this might take a decade and $5 billion or more, but Chen said venture firms are more comfortable with timelines like that.

“This kind of thing would have sounded crazy 10 years ago when we were all building mobile apps,” he said. “Starting it in 2026 just lets you tap into all the energy and excitement that’s that’s happening in the capital markets.”

Poon found his way into the space data center business by a circuitous route. After leaving Ford, he bought a Nvidia A100 on a lark, co-locating it in a Santa Clara data center and serving open-weight models. That first-hand experience convinced him the value in delivering compute in the era of AI.

Now he’s just got to put a couple thousand GPUs in space.

Photo credit: Delft University of Technology | Micro Aerial Vehicles Lab
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have built a navigation method for small drones that copies one of nature’s most efficient routines. Honeybees fly long distances along twisting routes yet still head home with striking accuracy. The new system lets a drone do something similar after just one short practice flight near its base, all while using a learning program small enough to fit in the memory of a basic phone app icon.

Honeybees keep track of distance and direction by observing how the ground and surroundings move past their eyes. Then, over time, slight inconsistencies begin to appear. To remedy this, bees will frequently undertake a quick small learning flight shortly after starting feeding, looping around the area near the hive and gathering all of their visual memory of what is around them. Later, when they’re far out in the wild, their memories guide them back to the hive, even though they can’t see it.

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A group of Delft researchers wanted to see if a drone might follow a similar path. Rather than develop an incredibly thorough three-dimensional picture of the entire area, as if a robot were trying to recall a complex plan, they just had the thing snap a few short panoramic photos during a quick learning fly around the starting position. They then uploaded the photographs to a small learning system, along with the drone’s initial estimates of how far and in which direction it had traveled. Yes, those calculations become a little jumbled, but the program still manages to extract enough information from the surroundings to determine its home territory and return the drone to that location.

When the drone takes off on a longer flight, it primarily relies on those motion estimates to get there and back, right up until it approaches the place where it learned to fly. The visual portion of the system then takes over and returns the drone to its original location. It also teaches the drone to fly faster when it is still in the wilderness and slow down as it approaches, similar to how bees adjust their own speed near the end of a journey.

Tests in these huge indoor environments were consistently successful. The drone might take off from a certain position, fly all the way to the other side of this massive hangar or test arena, and then return without ever seeing its home base. Outside, the same method worked fine for a drone that flew more than 600 meters before turning and returning home, and it continued to work well even on calm days, but it began to get a little wonky on windy days, primarily because gusts would blow the drone around and interfere with the camera’s view.

The outdoor version works on a learning system that uses only 42 kilobytes of memory, reducing memory utilization to a minimum. Traditional map-building methods often require substantially more memory and processing capacity, pushing designers to invest more in drones that use more energy and are more expensive to fly. The bee-inspired technique keeps the technology lightweight, allowing small drones to safely fly around people or into places like greenhouses where they don’t want to clash with anything.

Crop monitoring has a clear advantage because a lightweight drone can fly between rows of plants looking for early signs of disease or pests without the bulk or risk associated with larger mapping systems. The same navigation technique makes it perfect for robots moving about warehouses inspecting industrial equipment or functioning in places where satellite signals are distorted due to trees, buildings, or weather.
[Source]

DINUM, the digital affairs directorate of the French government, warned that hackers used a hijacked user account to breach Tchap, the French government’s encrypted messaging platform.

Developed in-house by DINUM in collaboration with ANSSI (the French Cybersecurity Agency) in 2018, Tchap is an instant messaging service and collaboration tool based on the decentralized Matrix protocol, designed exclusively for the French public sector.

Tchap has now reached over 300,000 monthly users and over 500,000 downloads on Google’s Play Store after Prime Minister François Bayrou mandated the use of Tchap and banned foreign apps for work communications for all civil servants in early August 2025.

DINUM revealed on Monday that ANSSI detected a Tchap breach on Sunday and said that a threat actor gained access to the secure instant messaging platform using a compromised user account.

The French digital affairs directorate has also alerted France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, to the incident due to the potential exposure of personal data shared by some users in conversations that the attacker could access, and has alerted all Tchap users, reminding them that public chat rooms are accessible to any user and are not encrypted.

“At this stage, the account originating the malicious requests has been identified. It was immediately blocked to remove the attacker’s persistent access and allow for a thorough analysis of the data they were able to access. The investigation continues, including the study of event logs, to identify the conversations that the attacker was able to access and the nature of the exfiltrated data,” DINUM said in a Monday press release.

“A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted. In accordance with Tchap’s terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.”

While the DINUM has not shared any further details regarding this breach, a threat actor claimed responsibility for the incident over the weekend, shared a sample of stolen files, and said they gained access to the platform following a social engineering attack.

​”I social engineered a valid account on the education shard (matrix.agent.education.tchap.gouv.fr). Everything below is what that one account could reach, other shards will have more,” they said.

​They claim to have stolen hardcoded LDAP credentials allegedly leaked via a PowerShell script shared by a French tax authority regional director and over 13.5GB of documents and media files shared by public servants using the Tchap service.

The threat actors also allegedly scraped nearly 650,000 messages and information on over 73,000 accounts, including email addresses, organization information, meeting links, and account and device metadata.

“Every file ever shared on Tchap, on any shard, is downloadable without a token,” they added. “The media IDs come from the messages. Once you have a message with a media URL you can pull the file freely regardless of which shard hosts it.”

BleepingComputer reached out to DINUM with questions about the incident, but a response was not immediately available.

Last month, French authorities detained a 15-year-old suspected of selling data stolen in an April cyberattack on ANTS (Agence nationale des titres sécurisés), the country’s agency for issuing and managing official identity and registration documents.

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