Unitree robots in the dog house
Urinary poor password hacked
Unmarking poo-lice territory

The news story today about a police robot is really a story about the economics of hardware safety, and why the lessons of WWII are so blindingly important to modern robotics.

Picture this: Police deploy a $16,000 Unitree robot into an armed siege (so they don’t have to risk sending any empathetic humans to deescalate instead). The robot’s tough titanium frame can withstand bullets, its sharp sensors can see through walls, and its AI can navigate complex obstacles like dead bodies autonomously. Then a teenager with a smartphone intervenes and takes complete control of it in a few minutes.

Cost of the zero day attack?

Zero dollars.

Are we still blowing a kid’s whistle into payphones for free calls or what?

This economic reality in asymmetric conflict reveals a fundamental dysfunction in how the robotics industry approaches risks. The embarrasing UniPwn exploit against Unitree robots has exposed authentication that’s literally the word “unitree,” hardcoded encryption keys identical across all devices, and complete absence of input validation.

I’ll say it again.

“Researchers” found the word unitree would bypass the Unitree robot security with minimal effort. We shouldn’t call that research. It’s like saying scientists have discovered the key you left in your front door opens it. Zero input validation means…

This is 1930s robot level bad.

For those unfamiliar with history, the design flaws of the Nazi V-1s are how we remember them. Yet even Hitler’s dumb robots had better security than Unitree in 2025 – at least the V-1s couldn’t be hijacked mid-flight by shouting “vergeltungswaffe” on radio frequencies.

WWII military technology had more sophisticated operational security than modern robots. Think about how genuinely damning that is for the current robotics industry. Imagine a 1930s jet engine with a fundamentally better design than one today.

It is a symptom of hardware companies treating their vulnerabilities in software as an afterthought, creating expensive physical systems that can be compromised for free. Imagine going to the gym and finding a powerlifter who lacks basic mental strength. “Hey, can someone tell me if the big and heavy 45 disc is more or less work than this small and light 20 one” a tanned muscular giant with perfect hair pleads, begging for help with his “Hegseth warrior ethos” workout routine.

French military planners spent billions pouring concrete for a man named Maginot, after he dreamed up what would have worked better for WWI. His foolish “impregnable” static defensive barrier was useless against coming radio-controlled planes and trucks and tanks using network effects to rapidly focus attacks somewhere else. The Germans needed only three days to prove the dynamic soft spots need as much attention or more than the expensive static hard ones. Robotics companies are making the identical strategic error, pouring millions into unnecessary physical hardening while leaving giant squishy digital backdoors wide open.

Unitree’s titanium chassis development costs over $50,000, military-grade sensors run $10,000 per unit, advanced motors cost $5,000 each, and rigorous testing burns through hundreds of thousands in R&D. So fancy. Meanwhile, authentication was literally fixed as “unitree,” while encryption was copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and input validation… doesn’t exist.

This pattern of inverted priorities by safety engineering ignoring the past extends far beyond Unitree. Just weeks ago in September 2025, Tesla influencers attempting a coast-to-coast “Full Self-Driving” trip crashed their Model Y within the first 60 miles when the car completely ignored a metal girder lying in the road.

The Tesla robot stupidly barreled into disaster at 76 mph and bounced dramatically into the air, causing an estimated $22,000 in damage and cancelling the trip before they even left California. This is the same company that has promised coast-to-coast autonomous driving by 2017 yet still can’t detect the most obvious and basic road debris. It was NOT an edge case failure. It was proof of Tesla flaws still being overlooked, despite extensive documentation of more than 50 deaths since the first ones in 2016.

Robots being marketed for special police use have been disappointing similarly for over a decade, as I’ve spoken and written about many times. In 2016, a 300-pound Knightscope K5 ran over a 16-month-old toddler at Stanford Shopping Center, hitting the child’s head and driving over his leg before continuing its patrol. The robot “did not stop and kept moving forward” according to the boy’s mother. A year later, another Knightscope robot achieved internet fame by rolling itself into a fountain at Georgetown Waterfront, prompting one cynical expert’s observation: “We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”

That’s being generous, of course, as the robot couldn’t even see the cliff it was throwing itself off.

These incidents illuminate a critical historical insight to economics of security: hardware companies systematically undervalue software engineering because their own mental models are flawed. Some engineers are so rooted in physical manufacturing they can’t see the threat models more appropriate to their work.

Traditional hardware development means you design a component once, manufacture it at scale, and ship it. Quality control means testing physical tolerances and materials science. If something breaks, you issue a recall. It’s bows and arrows or swords and shields. Edge cases thus can be waved off because probablity is discrete and calculated like saying don’t bring a knife to a gun fight (e.g. Tesla says don’t let any water touch your vehicle, not even humidity, because they consider weather an edge case).

Software is fundamentally different economics. We’re talking information systems of strategy, infiltration and alterations to command and control. It’s constantly attacked by adversaries who adapt faster than any recall process. It must handle infinite edge cases injected without warning, that no physical testing regime can anticipate. It requires ongoing maintenance, updates, and security patches throughout its operational lifetime. Most importantly, software failures can propagate instantaneously across entire fleets through network effects, turning isolated incidents into rapid systemic disasters.

A laptop without software has risks, and is also known as a paperweight. Low bar for success means it can scope itself towards low risk. A laptop running software however has exponentially more risks, as recorded and warned during the birth of robotic security over 60 years ago. Where engineering outcomes are meant to be more useful, they need more sophisticated threat models.

The UniPwn vulnerability exemplifies all of this and the network multiplication effect. The exploit is “wormable” because infected robots would automatically compromise others in Bluetooth range. One compromised robot in a factory doesn’t just affect that unit; it spreads to every robot within wireless reach, which spreads to every robot within their reach. A single breach becomes a factory-wide infection within hours, shutting down production and causing millions in losses. This is the digital equivalent of the German breakthrough at Sedan—once the line is broken, everything behind it collapses.

And I have to point out that this has been well known and discussed in computer security for decades. In the late 1990s I personally was able to compromise critical infrastructe across five US states with trivial tests. And likewise in the 90s, I sent a single malformed ping packet to help discover all the BSD-based printers used by a company in Asia… and we watched as their entire supply chain went offline. Oops. Those were the kind of days we were meant to learn from, to prevent happening again, not some kind of insider secret.

Hardware companies still miss this apparently because they don’t study history and then they think in terms of isolated failures rather than systemic vulnerabilities. A mechanical component fails gradually and affects only that specific unit. A software vulnerability fails catastrophically and affects every identical system simultaneously. The economic models that work for physical engineering through redundancy, gradual degradation, and localized failures become liabilities in software security.

Target values of the robots in this latest story range from $16,000 to $150,000. That’s crazy compared to an attack cost being zero: grab any Bluetooth device to send “unitree”. Damage potential reaches millions per incident through production shutdowns, data theft, and cascade failures.

Proper defense at the start of engineering would cost a few hundred dollars per robot for cryptographic hardware and secure development practices. Unitree could have prevented this vulnerability for less than an executive dinner. Now it’s going to be quite a bit more money to go back and clean up.

The perverse market incentive in security is that it remains invisible until it spectacularly fails. Hardware metrics will dominate purchasing decisions by focusing management on speed, strength, battery life, etc. while software quality is dumped onto customers who lack technical expertise to evaluate it in downscoped/compressed sales cycles. Competition then rewards shipping fast crap over shipping secure quality because defects manifest only after contracts are signed, under adversarial conditions kept out of product demonstrations.

The real economic damage of this loophole extends beyond immediate exposure of the vendor. When the police robot gets compromised mid-operation, the costs cascade through blown operations, leaked intelligence, destroyed public trust, legal liability, and potential cancellation of entire robotics programs, not to mention potential fatalities. The explosive damage could slow robotics adoption across law enforcement, creating industry-wide consequences from a single preventable vulnerability. Imagine also if the flaws had been sold secretly, instead of disclosed to the public.

It’s Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000 story all over again: sure it could read lips but the most advanced artificial intelligence in cinema was defeated by a guy pulling out its circuit boards with a… screwdriver. The simplest attacks threaten the most sophisticated robots.

Hardware companies need to internalize that in networked systems the security of the communications logic isn’t a feature. It’s the foundation of the networking. Does any bridge’s hardware matter if a chicken can’t safely cross to the other side?

All other engineering rests upon the soft logic working without catastrophic soft failure that renders hardware useless. The most sophisticated mechanical engineering becomes worthless where attackers can take control via trivial thoughtless exploits.

The robotics revolution is being built by companies that aren’t being intelligent enough to predict their own future by studying their obvious past. Until the market properly prices security risk through insurance requirements, procurement standards, liability frameworks, and certification programs, customers will continue paying premium prices for robots that will be defeated for free. The choice is stark: fix the software economics now, or watch billion-dollar robot deployments self-destruct.

And now this…

• 2014-2017: Multiple researchers document ROS (Robot Operating System) vulnerabilities affecting thousands of industrial and research robots
• 2017: IOActive discovers critical vulnerabilities in SoftBank Pepper robots – authentication bypass, hardcoded credentials, remote code execution
• 2017: Same vulnerabilities found in Aldebaran NAO humanoid robots used in education and research
• 2018: IOActive demonstrates first ransomware attack on humanoid robots at Kaspersky Security Summit
• 2018: Academic researchers publish authentication bypass vulnerabilities (CVSS 8.8) for Pepper/NAO platforms
• 2018: Alias Robotics begins cataloging robot vulnerabilities (RVD) – over 280 documented by 2025
• 2019-2021: Multiple disclosure attempts for Pepper/NAO vulnerabilities ignored by SoftBank
• 2020: Alias Robotics becomes CVE Numbering Authority for robot vulnerabilities
• 2021: SoftBank discontinues Pepper production with vulnerabilities still unpatched
• 2022: DarkNavy team reports undisclosed Unitree vulnerabilities at GeekPwn conference
• 2025: CVE-2025-2894 backdoor discovered in Unitree Go1 series robots
• 2025: UniPwn exploit targets current Unitree G1/H1 humanoids with wormable BLE vulnerability
• 2025: CVE-2025-60250 and CVE-2025-60251 assigned to UniPwn vulnerabilities
• 2025: UniPwn claims to be *cough* “first major public exploit of commercial humanoid platform” *cough* *cough*
• 2025: Academic paper “Cybersecurity AI: Humanoid Robots as Attack Vectors” documents UniPwn findings

Shout out to all those hackers who haven’t disclosed dumb software flaws in modern robots because… fear of police deploying robots on the wrong party (them).

Here is an interesting look at authenticity of provenance.

Whitworth argued that while the Kells monastery was founded in AD807, it did not become important until the later ninth century. “This is too late for the Book of Kells to have been made at Kells. The Iona hypothesis, while worth testing, has no more intrinsic value than any other,” she said.

Dr. Victoria Whitworth is proposing the Book of Kells is misnamed and was actually created at Portmahomack in Pictish eastern Scotland, rather than at the traditionally accepted location of Iona.

We need to start calling it a Book of Portmahomack, in other words, or at least a Book of Picts.

How many other “Irish” and “English” achievements are actually Scottish, Pictish, Welsh, or Cornish masterpieces culturally laundered through the extractive imperial narrative machine?

Let’s dig deep here into the significance of a British empire assigning sophistication of the Scots to the Irish instead. Irish monasticism gets celebrated as preserving Classical learning during the “Dark Ages,” while the Picts get dismissed as primitive. The suggestion that Picts actually created Kells completely flips the script on who were the “real” scholars and artists of early medieval Britain. It brings new light to centuries of English/British historical narratives that harshly marginalized Celtic cultures and undermined Scottish intelligence and study.

To be more precise, the Romans used scapegoating methods to assert unjust control. Like claims against the “woke” people today, they cooked a “barbarian conspiracy” as early information warfare. The term “Picti” itself was essentially propaganda for Romans to dismiss an indigenous civilization as “heathens” and justify psychological campaigns of erasure.

Therefore, attributing a masterpiece back to the Picts removes the British oppressive narrative of “no evidence of civilization” and directly challenges modern assumptions about the cultural sophistication of medieval Scotland.

In related news, Neal.fun has posted a fascinating game and (spoiler alert) now I’m not sure I’m not a robot.

This game is as unsettling as the 1980s movie Blade Runner (based on a 1960s book about AI) because it forces you to question your own humanity through increasingly absurd tests. Much like how imperial historians forced Celtic cultures to “prove” their sophistication through increasingly impossible standards, while simultaneously stealing their best evidence. The Picts couldn’t prove their sophistication because their manuscripts had been stolen to be boldly flaunted as Irish.

In the movie, replicants are given false memories to make them compliant. Imperial Britain gave Celtic peoples false cultural memories – teaching them they were empty vessels while celebrating their stolen achievements as someone else’s genius.

The Picts were essentially turned into cultural replicants – people with no “real” past, no authentic achievements, just vague “mysterious” origins. It’s like saying “these people never created anything beautiful” while hanging their greatest masterpieces in their neighbor’s house for them to see from afar, to cynically undermine their sense of self.

Whitworth’s archaeological evidence from Portmahomack reveals a form of cultural warfare, using information suppression and strategic blindness in a “master” plan. The evidence she has delivered is sound: vellum workshop, stone carving, matching artistic styles. But it has taken so long because anyone acknowledging it would have undermined the imperial story used to destroy authentic Scottish arts and aptitude; challenged false English narratives of brutality and barbarism. Her work has much wider implications.

“Irish” achievements probably Scottish:

• High crosses with distinctive knotwork patterns
• Illuminated manuscript techniques using local materials and motifs
• Advanced metalwork styles
• Stone circle Christian adaptations
• Scribal traditions and Latin scholarship methods

“English” innovations probably Celtic:

• Architectural elements in early English churches
• Legal concepts found in early Welsh and Irish law codes
• Agricultural techniques
• Poetic forms and literary devices
• Monastic organizational structures

The Book of Portmahomack being displayed as Irish achievement while the Pictish history was erased is simply a cruel British psychological operation. Imagine the point of generational trauma in Scots: your ancestors create Europe’s greatest manuscript, yet you’re raised in British schools to believe your people are helpless savages deserving only constant suppression and punishment.

The ultimate insult was propagandized by Hollywood’s Braveheart. Mel Gibson, infamous for his antisemitism, turned cultural genocide into entertainment, depicting Scots as mad face-painted fools with sticks fighting against civilized English armed troops in polished boots.

The movie’s disgustingly pejorative and inaccurate portrayal of the wrong time period, wrong clothing, and wrong everything perfectly served the toxic narratives of Gibson’s upbringing: Scots as angry backward savages who needed punishment under cruel English “civilization” to cure them of creativity and innovations.

The same dehumanizing logic that the Empire used against the Picts continues today through people like Gibson, who perpetuate both antisemitic and anti-Celtic stereotypes.

Let me be clear, I am not talking about slow or accidental normalization. Gibson’s modern products rest upon centuries of excusing calculated extremism. Imperial Britain enacted highly explicit policies of oppression like the Highland Clearances, The Acts of Union, the Dress Act of 1746 banning Highland dress, and the Education Act of 1872 requiring English-only instruction. Don’t even get me started on the resource destruction of widespread deforestation during WWII. These weren’t just “accumulated biases” but harsh and abrupt deliberate actions by British elites with documented intent to eliminate Scottish cultural identity.

Therefore, Mel Gibson’s blue-faced buffoonery of his fathers’ liking was an intergenerational ideological transmission of hateful propaganda, cementing toxic lies about Scots as simplistic angry underdogs rather than admitting the thoughtful and sophisticated artists (analytic and wise military strategists), whose masterpieces were stolen.

It’s like Gibson falsely telling stories of the lost worshipers of Ares, when in fact they were successful adherents to Athena.

Meanwhile, back in the world of science, archaeologists are proving how “primitive” Scots were in fact so far ahead of the English they created Europe’s most sophisticated manuscript 500 years before William Wallace was even born.

Kudos to Dr. Whitworth.

And now this…

Tactic	Period	Evidence
Othering	297 CE onwards	Romans label northern tribes as “Picti” (painted barbarians); Eumenius describes “savage tribes and half-naked barbarians”
Achievement Theft	~800 CE	Book of Kells/Portmahomack created by Picts, later attributed to Irish monasteries; vellum workshops and artistic techniques misattributed
Narrative Inversion	Medieval period onwards	Irish monasticism celebrated for preserving learning while Pictish scholarship erased; “barbarian conspiracy” becomes accepted history
Targeting Through Naming	4th-10th centuries	“Picti” becomes catch-all term for any unconquered peoples; enables systematic cultural erasure and justifies continued oppression