G1 Humanoid Robots Are Secretly Sending Information to China | Flood-Prone Houston Faces Hard Choices for Handling Too Much Water | The Nonsense and the Menace, and more
Security Researchers Say G1 Humanoid Robots Are Secretly Sending Information to China and Can Easily Be Hacked (Paul Arnold, Phys.org)
Researchers have uncovered serious security flaws with the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, a machine that is already being used in laboratories and some police departments. They discovered that G1 can be used for covert surveillance and could potentially launch a full-scale cyberattack on networks.
It sounds like the stuff of science fiction nightmares, robots that are secretly spying on you and could be controlled by remote hackers. However, the concern is real, as these types of robots are becoming increasingly common in homes, businesses, critical infrastructure and public spaces.
In a new study available on the arXiv preprint server, cybersecurity experts from Alias Robotics describe how they performed a digital audit on G1, reverse-engineering its internal software and eavesdropping on its internal communications to identify critical weaknesses.
Flood-Prone Houston Faces Hard Choices for Handling Too Much Water (Ivis García, James M. Kaihatu, and Shannon Van Zandt, The Conversation)
Eight years after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in 2017, flooding hundreds of thousands of homes, the city still awaits a comprehensive flood protection system. The local flood control district estimates that at least one major flood occurs within its service area every two years.
There are two competing potential options to contain these floods with tunnels to direct excess water out of the city to the coast – one from the local flood control district board and one from Elon Musk’s Boring Company, with the backing of a local member of Congress. The two proposals differ significantly in size, capacity, cost and expected completion time.
And in late August 2025, county commissioners said they would begin to study a third option, combining elements of both – using just two tunnels, like Musk’s proposal, but larger ones than Musk had indicated, with their sizes in line with the local flood control district’s recommendation.
The choice between these three options involves a balancing act between taxpayer dollars, engineering and forecasting about future storms and flooding.
How House Republicans Plan to Rewrite History of Jan. 6 (Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney, Politico)
A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day.
It’s the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel’s previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters.
FEMA Is Paralyzed. Disaster-Torn Communities Are Paying the Price. (Scott Patterson and Tarini Parti, Wall Street Journal)
St. Louis’s tornado was months ago, but it’s still waiting for hundreds of millions in federal recovery funds to arrive. It’s part of Trump’s plan to shift responsibility to the states and shrink the agency.
The Nonsense and the Menace (Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
Reading the president’s new orders on political violence and terrorism.
