Today marks another page ripped straight out of fascist history. Those familiar with Mussolini know he promoted state violence not primarily to maintain order, but to protect his own political instruments deployed to intimidate opposition.
Trump is clearly inverting state protection, just as Mussolini would.
Instead of the state protecting citizens from violent groups, the state protects the violent groups from citizens. Mussolini used the army and police to shield the Blackshirts as they attacked socialists, trade unionists, and political opponents. Trump today announced deploying troops to protect ICE operations (which have been conducting aggressive raids) from protesters.
Of course the tactic is based on abuse patterns, which are known well by those allegedly on the Epstein list of abusers. Victims of aggression are labeled as the aggressors, to strip away protections.
…people have kicked tear gas canisters back at them. […] Court documents also show federal officers have been impacted by their own use of chemical munitions. In one case, a person knocked loose an officer’s gas mask, causing the officer to “suck in a large amount of OC spray and pepperball dust.” The agent later vomited and dry-heaved for half an hour.
Mussolini chaos agents were presented by him as defenders of order against “Bolshevik chaos,” just as Trump falsely frames federal agents attacking protesters as him handling “domestic terrorists”. Local officials meanwhile describe Portland as “safe and calm” with declining protests, even during violent federal escalations.
Lawmakers cited recent incidents, including the detention of a father outside his child’s preschool and a wildland firefighter who was arrested while battling fires in the Olympic National Forest. They also pointed to a statistic… that 65% of people detained by ICE had no criminal convictions.
Mussolini normalized the use of state power against political opposition. Similarly, Trump is regularly deploying troops to multiple politically targeted cities – Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Portland despite clear local opposition and questionable legal authority.
As an aside, the economics of militancy also are terrible. In 2020 Trump spent almost 10X more on troops to police a court house than it would have cost to improve the space itself.
The estimated cost of the federal action in Portland was $12.3 million, according to the report. Damage to Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland was about $1.6 million.
That was the kind of lesson from back in 2020, which in theory could itself prevent a repeat through basic fiscal responsibility. It shows how wasteful federal militancy can be, begging the real motives.
Mussolini circumvented logic of parliamentary processes. Trump is also proceeding without proper congressional notification or local consent, with Pentagon officials reportedly surprised by the deployment announcement. Mussolini loved to announce faits accomplis that his subordinates had to scramble to implement, symptomatic of how he would force the center of attention onto himself by being chaotic and unreliable. It turns leadership upside down by destroying direction and purpose, shifting everyone into excessive, unsustainable whimsy that by design only a few could survive.
The headline news, in other words, is describing America experiencing 1930s Italy and the actual mechanics of how democratic institutions are dismantled from within by fascism.
A state apparatus is obviously weaponized to protect the ruling party’s enforcement mechanisms and criminalizing all resistance. This is a textbook case of authoritarian progression presented by MAGA. Knowing about violent and chaotic descent of Italian life under the shadow of Mussolini (let alone Somalia under Siad Barre) is essential for understanding the pattern.
What makes it particularly dangerous is that Americans infamously lack historical literacy to the point that they think Nazism boldly on display is proof of healthy freedom.
“Skokie was chosen as the hub for American Nazis in 1977 and 1978 because of the number of Holocaust survivors who called it home.” ABC News
People are looking for Blues Brothers simplistic depictions of goose-stepping soldiers marching around with swastikas waving, instead of recognizing far more dangerous rhetoric about invasion, gradual institutional capture and political targeting with state violence. Look at Italy on this chart:
The mechanics of using troops to protect violent political enforcement agents in ICE while criminalizing resistance, all bypassing normal governance through unitary executive chaos, are… unmistakable five-alarm sirens telling you that authoritarian consolidation in America happening right now and fast.
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.
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 Spitfire “tipping” the flawed Nazi V1 in flight, because ironically Hitler’s robots couldn’t properly calculate their axis
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.
The Onion reveals Pete’s tragicomedy status as the least capable or qualified military leader in history
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.
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.
ISACA 2019 Presentation
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.
My BSidesLV 2011 presentation on cloud security concepts for “big data” foundational to safe intelligence gathering and processing
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
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).
An American vendor has demonstrated that its microwave system easily can stop certain drone swarms.
…an Epirus Leonidas directed energy, high-power microwave (HPM) anti-drone weapon has knocked 49 Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) out of the air with one shot.
They are demonstrating an expensive, large and heavy piece of defense equipment. I hope I’m not surprising anyone by saying this sounds unrealistic.Epirus says their Leonidas product is light and mobile, yet released this photo
So, let’s run the numbers.
A roll of aluminum foil at standard thickness is about 27 g/m² and provides 85+ dB of attenuation from 30-100 MHz.
A small drone needs only about 0.15 m² of coverage, which means cost less than 50 cents per drone, for about 4 grams. The DJI Mini, for example, weighs under 249g, meaning 4g is a 1.6% weight penaly for shielding.
So back-of-napkin math says 50 cents neutralizes a $66 million-dollar microwave weapon system? Right?
Take a 1000-drone swarm, total shielding still would be under $300, meaning the “one-to-many” advantage of microwave attack… is easy “foiled”.
American defense contracting seems so stuck into “lemonomics” and “navel gazing” lately, that it begs what outcomes will look like measured against any real world adversary with the most basic grasp of physics. While big energy concepts in theory could still defeat little unshielded drones, how many public schools with kids coming up with far better ideas were defunded to release this thing?
A pedestrian was struck and killed by a driver near Science World Thursday night, according to Vancouver police.
The 38-year-old man was hit by a white Tesla at the intersection of Terminal Avenue and Western Street just before 8:30 p.m., the department said in a statement.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
