Ex-Palantir executives Andy Elder and Arjun Mathur have launched Dream, a startup building AI world models to automate architecture and construction design. The company has raised $17 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from SV Angel, XYZ, and Zigg Capital, and aims to replace legacy tools like AutoCAD and Revit. Dream's model is trained on over 100 million square feet of building data drawn from U.S. permit archives, incorporating physics and construction standards rather than just generating images.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-29
Dream researchers say they uncovered artifacts from an AI-assisted campaign that combined a custom PHP2Shell exploit chain with a kernel privilege-escalation flaw to compromise firewall devices. The campaign reportedly rooted 25 servers across the US, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, with three machines in a US government-affiliated network singled out for further attacks on Active Directory, including credential theft and directory enumeration.
dreamgroup.com
· 2026-10-29
Dream Group trained an 8-billion-parameter model, called MiST, on 220,000 vulnerability records, threat reports and detection rules, and reported improved average performance across 13 cybersecurity tasks such as vulnerability analysis questions. Anthropic separately said its Opus 5.5 model, released in September, cut costs 40% versus Opus 5 on typical workloads while maintaining performance.
darkreading.com
· 2026-10-27
A new robotics system called Dream-1 is designed to generalize zero-shot to tasks, environments, and robot hardware it has never encountered before, removing the need for each robot to collect its own training data first. Its developers point to falling hardware costs, including bimanual robot arm setups priced as low as $2,000, as a second factor making wider robot deployment feasible. Together, they argue, these shifts could let robotics escape the chicken-and-egg problem that has long slowed the field compared with self-driving cars.
dreamlabs.ai
· 2026-10-24
Canva has released Canva Craft, its first self-developed image generation model, built by its research team with contributions from Leonardo.ai researchers acquired in 2024. The model generates images up to 2K resolution in 30 aspect ratios using a two-stage process that first plans layout and text placement, then renders the image, and it is trained on Canva's design templates rather than photographs.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-22
With major VR makers scaling back or discontinuing headset lines, a small community of hobbyists is building their own headsets from a few hundred dollars worth of parts, requiring soldering, firmware flashing and 3D printing. One sim racing enthusiast, prompted by Microsoft ending support for its Windows Mixed Reality platform, documented the process and the many technical hurdles involved. Third-party drivers such as OASIS on Steam have also emerged to keep older WMR headsets functional after official support ended.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-19
A recent study reveals that the cumulative expenses for homes, vehicles, family needs, and leisure activities now exceed the typical lifetime earnings of many Americans. The report highlights a growing affordability gap that affects a broad swath of the population.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-07
Sam Tooley founded Alpha Fit Club in a 700-square-foot New Jersey studio in 2019, starting as a personal training business before his father's sudden death pushed him to grow it into a full venture. The strength-and-conditioning franchise now has 20 studios operating and 30 more sold across the East Coast, and will host its largest event yet, Alpha Games, on October 3 at American Dream Mall, featuring 1,550 members and 750 teams.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-28
Researchers from the DREAM Security Research Team disclosed a pre-authentication buffer overflow in the LINEMODE SLC negotiation handler of GNU inetutils' Telnet server, a flaw dating back to 1994. Because many vendors' Telnetd implementations, including those in major Linux distributions, derive from the same codebase, the bug's reach extends well beyond a single project.
labs.watchtowr.com
· 2026-09-16
Android launched publicly in 2008 on the HTC-made T-Mobile G1, a bulky device with a sliding screen and awkward physical keyboard, built hastily to counter Apple's iPhone. Google had bought Android and its creator Andy Rubin in 2005 for $50 million, originally envisioning it as camera software before pivoting to mobile after the iPhone's 2007 debut spurred urgency.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-01
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