It’s not every day you see a video that starts with chickens and ends with a genuine national security concern, but then, these are strange times. The story starts with YouTuber, musician, and increasingly influential amateur cybersecurity researcher Benn Jordan’s attempt to get a robot dog from Chinese firm Unitree—also responsible for the questionable Gundam and the kung-fu deathbots—to guard his chicken coop. The robot proves an abject failure at doing this, and at anything else remotely useful. What it does turn out to be good at, according to Jordan, is sending data back to China.
While the robot’s general uselessness is amusing, the really interesting part of the video comes once Jordan starts to look into the robot’s information security features—or, more specifically, the alleged lack thereof. This section of the video starts strong with the revelation that Jordan was able to obtain root access to the dog—yes, that’s a phrase I just typed—by adding Curl commands to the end of his wifi password.
This allows full access to the dog, which, as Jordan says, involves “not only controlling their movement, but also recording, downloading, and livestreaming audio and video information from the robot’s surroundings without an authenticated connection through the app.” (At this point, it’s probably worth noting that police departments across the country are merrily spending tax revenue on these robots like it’s Monopoly money.)
There are also other fun little pieces of information, like the dog’s weird built-in ChatGPT implementation, through which Jordan was able to convince it to “disable its safety functions and give up API info”; the fact that the dog’s radio control frequency is easily replicable; and most of all, the fact that while the robot’s firmware doesn’t take your security seriously in the slightest, it takes the security of the data it’s sending home—and the location to which it’s sending that data—very seriously indeed.
The last part of the video catalogs Jordan’s attempts to figure out exactly what information the robot is collecting and where it’s being sent. The ins and outs of it are really worth watching for yourself, but the tl;dr is that, as Jordan puts it, “some, if not all, Unitree 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.”
On a completely unrelated note, hey, did we mention that the US military has been buying these robodogs? As Jordan says, “If we were living in a time when the Federal Government would take this type of thing seriously, this would be something I would report privately.” But, of course, we are living in the most stupid of all possible worlds, so instead, we’re watching this on YouTube.
It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially 2026 story than this saga, and there’s probably a word in German for its very specific mixture of absurdity, stupidity, hilarity, and terror. In the absence of such a word, however, I’ll leave you with this screenshot—wherein, just to be clear, it’s the robot dog saying “Hey little lamb over there, you’re off course [and] going [in] the wrong direction”, not Jordan himself.
The key figure, though, is the real dog, gazing upon its robotic counterpart—and, indeed, the entire scene—with a mixture of bewilderment and genuine concern. We are all this tiny dog, pondering the foolishness of mankind. Or maybe we’re just the robot dog, narrating its own divergence from the path of sanity. What a piece of work is man, indeed.
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