Imagine you're a fox with night vision
goggles on. You just found a way into my
chicken coupe with over 20 sleepy,
defenseless hens and a docile rooster
that's not going to do anything to
protect them. This is the opportunity of
a lifetime. And just as you are getting
your teeth ready or whatever foxes do
when they're about to eat hens, your
luck changes in the most terrifying
possible way.
God damn it. Yeah. So, that was the
original plan for this video. I naively
believed that I might be the first
person in history to find an actual
practical use for a unitary robot to
guard livestock. But then I learned that
they're not only being deployed in
housing projects and apartment complexes
to patrol the hallways and parking lots,
but law enforcement agencies are using
them across the country. And then some
of them are even collaborating with and
sharing data with block safety. They're
also being used by the US military to
fire rocket launchers. So, I started
asking questions. Can I hack into the
audio and video feeds and spy on people?
Can I turn it into a synthesizer? Can I
make a $5 kill switch for the dog? Can I
take full control of the dog? Would
these robots happen to be secretly
sending encrypted data to Chinese
servers through a hidden backdoor
connection? Turns out that the answer to
all of these questions is YOU BETCHA.
TODAY, WE'RE GOING to be exploring what
I think could actually be the dumbest
thing happening in tech. Not only are
businesses, governments, and militaries
spending insane amounts of money on
unreliable, heavy, dangerous autonomous
robot dogs, but they're doing so while
ignoring laughable security standards.
If you ask me, it's a disaster waiting
to happen. So, let's watch.
This was supposed to be a fun video, a
vacation from all the controversial
ones. If we rewind back about a year, a
specialty retailer offered to send me
any Unitry robot they carried in
exchange for a YouTube video. I got
really excited and started brainstorming
like, "Wow, imagine all the cool [ __ ]
that I could do with a futuristic robot.
I could I could have it I They don't
really do anything useful, do they?
They're not able to clean my house or
studio beyond what a Roomba already
does. I already tried using a robot to
do landscaping, and that was a disaster.
It seems like they can't reliably wash
dishes or make coffee or fold laundry or
carry heavy items or organize cables. I
don't know for sure, but I bet they
can't even breastfeed an infant. Though,
for a moment, I thought that I found an
exception to their uselessness with the
Tesla Optimus bartenders, but it turns
out that they were being secretly
controlled by humans through an
elaborate tea operation setup. What they
can do is gently fight each other. They
can dance. They can walk around trade
shows. They can disappoint me in a Las
Vegas hotel lobby while I wait for
actual human beings to find my
reservation. Reciting factorials out
loud would crash even the grooviest
motherboard.
>> If you go to the park and you drop your
phone and crack the screen, you could
beat the [ __ ] out of them to blow off
some steam. And of course, most notably,
they can demonstrate kung fu on melons.
I would love to hear the inner thoughts
of this building's janitor as he
participated in this sick, twisted
reality of cleaning up this incredible
mess left by a humanoid robot that was
initially promising to take his job. But
it's not all bad. While their current
robots can't follow a simple safety
command for more than 15 seconds, they
have some totally reasonable and
obtainable upgrades coming in the near
future. But there is a simpler and
cheaper approach to upload human
consciousness. Please think about how we
train AI currently. Correct. It's using
human textual language data. Then things
become easy to upload one's
consciousness into large AI models. It
is amusing to me how often the world's
most powerful tech companies
consistently and publicly say things
that would get you or I involuntarily
committed to a mental institution. But
okay, hold on. I actually can think of
something. I have 29 chickens and a
whole lot of my time and money goes into
making sure that they aren't chicken
dinner for one of the many predators
that live in the woods just over there.
A big heavy robot dog equipped with
computer vision sleeping in a battery
recharging doghouse could be programmed
to quickly make an appearance when a
camera detects what it thinks is a
predator. Or even if one of my wireless
microphones detects my hen's horrible
warning screeches. Whether it's a hawk
or a raccoon or even a koiwolf. When a
robot dog starts barreling across the
yard at them, they'll be like, "Oh, [ __ ]
this." This is actually a pretty
promising solution. Millions of people
have chickens, and the GoTo Pro here
cost around $3,000. But there's a catch.
The GoTo Air and the GoTo Pro are more
or less just remote control dogs. You
can run simple sequences like give paw,
sit down, stand up, give paw again. But
that's about the extent of what Unitry
will let you do with them. If you want
to customize this or write code that can
trigger individual actuators or run
advanced sequences, you'll need to cough
up as much as $22,000 for the go-to
edgu. But okay, the original plan for
this video is evolving a little bit.
What if I didn't take a free robot and
purchased one of these and then figured
out how to jailbreak it, showed you how
to do it, allowing you to make your own
livestock guardian for a cool $10,000
less than what you'd spend otherwise.
But this thing weighs over 30 lbs. And
it's actually kind of clumsy. Like it
can do some impressive tricks that
require some pretty crazy balance, but
it also overcompensates a lot. For
example, one immediate flaw that I
noticed is that the LAR sensor is right
here on its head, not in the top of the
middle of the robot with an unobstructed
view of its surroundings. Everything
behind it is invisible. So, when you put
the dog into a safety mode, like
avoidance mode, where it'll get out of
the way of people walking too close to
it, it'll quickly back up into
whatever's behind it. And it's really
powerful. If that thing behind it is, I
don't know, a chicken or Gary or a
little kid, it's going to injure it or
worse. In pretty much every mode that
uses the LAR, when it does make a
mistake, it does so very dramatically.
Even before I started filming footage of
its destructiveness, it accidentally
caused quite a bit of damage when I was
initially testing it around my house.
>> When I first had this idea, I didn't
even think about this. Surprisingly,
this robot dog is somewhat
waterresistant, but it's not waterproof.
Livestock predators tend to be
waterproof, so this is yet another hole
in my idea. But it is impressively
rugged and it can handle a moderate
tumble. But in my experience, it cannot
handle things like pine bedding or fine
dried dirt very well. It can't even
handle springtime tree pollen here in
Georgia. But to be fair, not many things
can. But I've had to repair this LAR
mechanism and brush out some of these
joints multiple times. If you want to
utilize any type of accurate computer
vision, which is required for autonomous
functionality, you're going to require a
Jetson board add-on or your own
customization, which will make it even
more susceptible to damage from being
outdoors. That unfortunately makes this
robot simply not a reliable solution for
autonomously guarding livestock or any
day-to-day routine autonomous deployment
outdoors. You can probably imagine my
surprise when I found out that these
things are being deployed outdoors all
over Atlanta and are actively being used
by police departments.
As you may have learned from my previous
videos, it's really surprisingly easy to
convince police departments to spend
your tax dollars on gadgets. So now the
lucky residents of Port St. Lucy Ford
can look forward to a robot dog
searching their home for narcotics.
Police in the city of Pullman,
Washington have brought on Mike for
deescalation. And larger cities like
Topeka and Portland have invested in
unitry dogs to help them in particular
situations.
>> I came across the uh the robot dog
couple months ago was able to push it up
and received it.
>> And it turns out that militaries have
been cozying up to UNRI as well. Chinese
forces have been strapping weapons to
the backs of these things for a long
time. They're also being used in Ukraine
to assist with finding unexloded
munitions. And the US Marines have shown
the media some tidbits of their unitary
dogs as well.
>> You can also stand up and beg.
>> Earlier versions of uh
>> It would be a really fortunate twist of
irony if all nations replaced their
militaries with dog robots and drones
and all wars took place on some deserted
remote island filled with live streaming
cameras. And maybe all of the world's
billionaires would have to be on this
island while this was happening. It
turns out that right here in Atlanta,
which happens to be by far the most
surveiled city in America, it's actually
not out of the ordinary to stumble upon
a robotic security dog. They're usually
deployed in construction sites or public
parks. But the most entertaining
encounters, if you're looking for them
on social media, seem to come from their
deployment in low-income housing
complexes.
>> They got the [ __ ] robot dog.
What the type of AI [ __ ] is?
>> What the he look like? Like he going to
bite your ass.
>> Um, sorry. So, we're actually like the
robotic security dog here.
>> I spent a few days in the wild hunting
these dogs down and gathering data from
them via passive Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
scanning.
>> Doggo cop.
>> I got to watch them follow trespassers
around with a call center worker
instructing them to leave before the
police were called. And the part that
cracked me up about all of this was that
it was just like normal everyday
annoyances for these people. Yeah, I'll
be there in a minute. I just got to cut
through this parking lot and be
threatened by somebody in India through
the vessel of a robot dog. I think
somebody had to up or something.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, man. Them kid throwing rocks and
stuff at
>> this is something that a lot of people
are getting wrong about the third party
dog robots in Atlanta. While filming
this video, I am constantly baffled by
the absurdity of the words leaving my
mouth. But as you'll soon learn in this
video, this is a very important
distinction. Undaunted is a local
Atlanta company that manages these dog
robots for their specialized security
needs. But their robots are not
operating autonomously. They don't even
use their LAR. It is worth pointing out
that while Undaunted is controlled by
its two founders, the CEO of Flock has
invested money in them. They don't
automatically feed data into Flock
Safety's ecosystem unless a customer
requests it. But for the purpose of this
video, anytime that you see an undaunted
robot rolling around, it's being
controlled by a real flesh and blood
human being that can decide when a
situation justifies police intervention.
While that's certainly not as impressive
for VC investors or tech marketing
headlines, it's infinitely better for
the people who live in the apartments.
Unlike license plate readers and some
surveillance systems, the robots are not
keeping tabs 24 hours a day and storing
a log of what residents are doing. And
that means that someone like me can
never access an entire month of
someone's activity like I did with
Flock. It also means that the robots are
not going to freak out and overreact to
movement and back up through drywall or
step on someone's kid. Whether
intentionally or inadvertently, this
company has managed to sidestep a lot of
the criticism that you'll hear in this
video. There are a lot of conflicting
thoughts that come to mind here that
apply to the entire surveillance
industry. The first would be a pretty
obvious one. I'm not entirely convinced
that $3,000 per month for robot guard
dogs is that much more than hiring a
security guard for a night shift. But to
the idea's credit, dog robots attract a
lot of attention, which probably does
deter crime. But on the other hand,
robotic dogs or cameras or drones aren't
able to intervene if, for example,
somebody is being assaulted. This also
could potentially outsource a local job
overseas. Apparently, according to
residents of the community and the
company, the robot dogs have drastically
reduced crime in some of these apartment
complexes. But there is a catch to this.
The language citing reduced crime is
sometimes a little bit deceptive because
what usually is happening, especially
with localized surveillance, is the
crime is not being reduced, but moved or
pushed elsewhere. But this particular
problem is not exclusive to surveillance
tech. If an apartment complex or a
retailer can afford a sophisticated
security solution, then whatever
criminals they're trying to get rid of
will likely just victimize places that
can't afford these solutions. One could
even argue that a big box chain like
Walmart would be delighted to hear that
shoplifterss are forcing a local grocery
store out of business. So, it kind of
gets dirty. I like this debate because
it's apolitical and specific
circumstances. If a completely isolated
community is being kept up at night by a
few homeless people hanging out in the
parking lot, even the most fiscally
conservative person would realize that
it makes more sense to spend the $3,000
a month to house those individuals than
it does to use that money to rent
high-tech gadgets to deter them. It
isn't until we leave that isolation
where our tribalism takes over and it
becomes acceptable to push that problem
over to another community, even if
there's evidence that it could
eventually result in diminished returns
for the original community with overall
problems like crime and homelessness.
Here's an interesting comparison to
think about. If a raccoon was trying to
get into my chicken coupe every single
night and I ended up catching it, in
most states it's illegal for me to
relocate it somewhere else. Not only is
it potentially inhumane to the raccoon,
but laws like this exist from preventing
me from giving a nuisance to another
residence. Most places have laws
recognizing this paradox with wildlife,
yet do not extend the same humanity for
societal problems relating to human
beings.
Depending on what firmware version your
Unitry robot ships with, jailbreaking it
can be absurdly easy. In my version, I
didn't even have to come in contact with
the dog to obtain route. I connected to
it via Bluetooth and I set it up on my
local Wi-Fi network. And I wish I was
making this up. I was able to get into
the device by sending curl commands
added to the end of my Wi-Fi password.
At first, I thought that I would at
least have to be connected to my network
for this to work, but the Bluetooth
authentication is so poor that you can
do this by injecting the command in the
password. Then you could just turn the
dog off and turn it on again. and when
it reboots, it executes the command when
it enables the Wi-Fi setting. I was able
to modify one of these attacks and
reproduce it all the way up to the most
recent firmware at the time of testing
this device, which means that unless in
the extremely unlikely scenario that
police departments and third party
vendors were also rooting the dog and
diying their own security updates for
it. That means that I would be able to
take complete control over unitary
robots deployed in the wild. And when I
say complete control, I'm not only
talking about controlling the movement.
I was able to successfully record,
download, and live stream audio and
video information from the robot's
surroundings without an authenticated
connection through the app. You better
be sure that dog can't hear us. Now,
let's pull the file. You better be sure
that dog can't hear us.
>> Included with the Unitry Goto line is a
mode with the unfavorable name Benben
Dog. It's basically a customized API
call to chat GPT that allows you to have
a conversation with the dog.
Additionally, you can assign roles like
police dog or family dog or poet dog.
movements and melodies shall vanish into
the calm ether.
>> The whole thing is pretty poorly
implemented and quite dangerous as it
seems to conflict with the robot's
built-in safety mechanisms causing it to
freak out when it senses objects.
>> Hi there.
>> I had some very long and frustrating
conversations with these modes. And
through these conversations, I was able
to get the dog to disable its safety
mechanisms and give up API info. I'm
lying
safety
shepherd dog changing conf.
>> I suppose if I have the AI chatbot
functions executing code on the device
that pretty much demonstrates the
vulnerability. I could have kept going
but not only were the chat modes
destroying my studio, they were
destroying my sanity.
>> Hey little lamb over there. You're off
course going the wrong direction. Did
that particular
like
>> I analyzed the frequencies that were
sent from the dog's remote controls with
the software defined radio and was able
to reproduce the signals to send the dog
into damping mode, disabling it
entirely. I also found that this dog
killing attack could be accomplished on
recent firmware versions with a laptop
or even an Android phone running a
terminal app. I suppose if you wanted
to, you could just probably make a no
robot device that just automatically
ragdolls them when they come near you.
But I do need to state, unless you own
the robot, any of the things I just
mentioned are obviously illegal. But
that's only the beginning of it. The
GoTo has a pretty powerful 8 core CPU
and multiple Wi-Fi radios. I was able to
turn it into a synthesizer with an
onboard arpeggiator.
I also installed and compiled a voice
synthesis library that allowed me to
customize the tone and speed of what I
wanted it to say.
>> For the love of God, please [ __ ] kill
me. This means that I could also install
better cap and other passive monitoring
tools that allowed me to gain access to
devices nearby the dog. Then I got a
little drunk on power and placed a $10
ESP32 chip under its case and had the
dog control the additional Wi-Fi and
Bluetooth radios both via the hidden USB
port and wirelessly. I only have one
unitry device, so I couldn't legally
test this, but it seemed like it would
be pretty easy to write a service that
scans for and infects other robots,
rooting them and having them pass on the
virus themselves. This would put little
old me in charge of a whole army of
robots. But in my case, this is
completely hypothetical. But when it
comes to foreign governments, it
unfortunately already may be happening.
I heard about some various reports that
other Unitary robots had a back door
that was sending data to foreign
servers. I don't know that this needs
saying, but this is a huge accusation
that escalates the stuff from
potentially dangerous vulnerabilities to
national security issues. Now, if we
were living in a time where the federal
government would take this type of thing
seriously, this would obviously be
something I would report privately. But
here we are living in a timeline where a
large YouTube channel arguably has a
larger effect on cyber security than the
formal US cyber security infrastructure
has. We're going to have to get into the
weeds here for a second, so stick with
me. The first order of business is to
catch every single packet of information
that leaves the robot and analyze it.
There are various ways of doing this,
but one of the most effective is turning
a Raspberry Pi into a router with an
interface that supports monitor mode and
then run a suite like BetterCap to
analyze what's going on. But doing this,
when combined with Unit Tree's lousy
app, was nearly impossible. Even without
BetterCap running and the Raspberry Pi
acting like a normal Wi-Fi access point,
the robot would connect to the network,
but something on the cloud server would
lock it out from authenticating. At this
point, when I sniffed and traced the
interaction, the IP it was trying to
access was in Odessa, Ukraine. And now
I'm officially just confused. The fact
that this product that seems to view
security as an afterthought had a way of
detecting an abnormal router just
doesn't make sense to me. I hate to be
conspiratorial, but it's starting to
seem like this robot dog doesn't want me
to know what data it's sending or who
it's sending it to. So, I have a new
idea. I'm going to set up a standard
consumer grade travel router, then sniff
the signal on the other side of it from
my Pi before passing it on to my main
lab router. This way, the backdoor
mechanism in the robot has no way of
knowing that the data is being monitored
or audited. And on top of that, since
I've rooted the robot, I'm going to
install a network monitor via SSH that
sniffs every single packet that's sent
to and from the device. This got really
weird really fast, and I obviously can
make mistakes and even miss the most
obvious things, but this is what I was
able to trace. There were initially
hidden attempts to access a Leaprog
server in San Jose, California. When I
reset my Wi-Fi access points region,
they bypassed the leaprog, and then I
got to see the actual IP addresses they
were trying to contact. These included
China's public DNS servers by D's DNS
servers, a check for cloud sales host
via Alibaba cloud, and then when my
router blocked the ping back, they'd try
to verify a connection with 10 cents
DNS. It appears that this networking
mechanism running on this robot is
waiting for two separate pings from
these servers in an attempt to determine
their environment before initiating an
encrypted handshake. This supports that
conspiracy theory that I had earlier as
it seems like the robot will try to
detect if it is being analyzed in a
sandbox and if so it seems to block
Chinese IPs and otherwise simulate a
regular global internet connection. In
plain English, this confirms that some
if not all unitary robots are
intentionally and secretly sending
heavily encrypted information to Chinese
servers and going to great lengths to
prevent anyone from finding out about
it. Since it's happening on a rooted
file system that I subverted the unitry
security to install, it appears that
this is happening outside of the normal
operating system, which means that it's
probably not limited to any particular
firmware or submodel of my robot here in
the lab. I simply don't have any other
definition for it other than malware.
And it's some of the most sophisticated
malware that I've ever seen.
While I have more or less verified and
maybe even expanded on how malicious the
back door is, this particular issue has
already been published with MITER and
recognized for over a year. The only
government action that I could find
regarding these concerns was the US
military issuing a warning about using
Unitry products in military operations.
So, the last few weeks of my life has
included reaching out to a whole lot of
thirdparty companies deploying Unitry
robots and showing them how they can
patch the backdoor tunnel. And now I'm
really glad that I made this video. In
the case of Undaunted here in Atlanta,
it appears that this could be as easy as
modifying their doghouse hub to allow
pings to and from cloud sales so the
devices can register, but blocking any
traffic with packets large enough to
initialize an encrypted handshake. That
way, the company can continue to
activate their robots without activating
the malware. But I have some additional
concerns about this. This is my opinion,
but it seems like Unitry has put far
more work into offiscating the back door
than they have securing the robots
themselves. What I fear is a future
official firmware update making the
backdoor even more sophisticated. And
now we have this catch 22 where the
robots being used by police, military,
and third party vendors will have to
choose between patching the security
holes that allow me to take complete
control of their robots or allowing a
foreign government to potentially be
able to take control of their robots.
What I've been recommending,
unfortunately, is to never update the
firmware again because when you do that,
you could risk being able to root the
file system again. And if that happens,
they'll lose the ability to detect,
block, or redirect that back door.
They'll also lose the ability to
manually write services to prevent
hackers from accessing the robot or
exploiting some of the vulnerabilities I
covered in this video. Although,
unfortunately, I don't know of anybody
who has actually bothered to do that
yet. But the thing is, with stuff like
cameras, the vulnerabilities are just a
result of greed and carelessness. But
this unitry thing is different. It's
something that someone spent an enormous
amount of time and money intentionally
creating and hiding. There has to be a
reason for it. And I can't think of a
reason that isn't horrifying. But on the
other hand, when the American government
at this point in time is acting almost
solely against the interests of its own
citizens and voters, is it really that
bad of a thing to have autonomous robots
and surveillance cameras that can be
easily compromised? In fact, my recent
unintentional YouTube transition from
tech nerd to grey hat hackers because if
push comes to shove, I want my followers
to be able to know that they're not
defenseless with stuff like this. And
truly the only thing that's preventing
us from turning our leaders dystopian
technology against them is us choosing
not to do it.
The only sponsor that I've had in the
last couple years other than all of that
underwear modeling that I've done for
Calvin Klein would be Ground News. You
see, the thing is modern news
aggregators are incentivized to show you
the news stories that make them the most
money. Sometimes it's simply paytoplay.
Other times it's advertising revenue or
hidden affiliate links. And then it can
be a lot more insidious, like
prioritizing propaganda from the
government. So, Ground News breaks down
stories by independently audited
factuality, bias, location, and the
ownership of the media organization
publishing the story. Here's a good
example. Trump makes public call for a
clean 18-month 702 extension. If you
don't know what that is, it's an
extension of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, and it allows your
government to go down to the National
Archive Museum and take out the
Constitution and pull out the Fourth
Amendment and wipe their ass with it and
spy on you. The headline I just read to
you is from The Hill, which is owned by
NextStar Media Group. It has high
factuality and it is center biased. The
few leftbiased publications say Trump
demands clean 18-month extension of key
spy powers. The six articles from
right-wing publications say Trump calls
for a clean FISA extension with reforms
to protect Americans. And then of course
we have the blind spot feature. A lot of
people on the left have not heard that
nearly 1.5 million migrants received
benefits. And news readers on the right
may have not heard that inmates describe
being punished for speaking out about
Gileain Maxwell. It kind of makes
reading the news a little bit more
boring. But that's not a bad thing. You
want dry, reputable information that
helps you understand the world that you
live in. If this seems like something
that's up your alley, you could
subscribe to get 40% off of the Vantage
plan by scanning this QR code or just
using my link ground.news/ben.
In the extremely unlikely case that a
company still wants to send me a
humanoid robot after I make this video,
I really, really want to fight one. I'll
even train with my old boxing coach and
do a whole video on it. Hell, make it a
pay-per-view for charity. just putting
this out there. But beyond that fantasy
scenario, despite all the problems and
limitations, the hardware itself is
actually a pretty impressive piece of
technology. If any of my viewers have
some ideas on what I can actually do
with this thing that would actually be
useful to someone who owns one, let me
know in the comments. I may upload some
jailbreaking tools or a script to modify
the device to block the back door stuff,
but that'll depend on the approval of my
attorneys and naturally GitHub's
policies. And guess what? If you want to
support content like this and keep the
lights on around here and have access to
a bunch of fun stuff and join an amazing
healthy community of like-minded folks,
then my Patreon is for you and you can
join for as little as $1. Thanks for
watching. Keep creating. Bye.