[HN Gopher] ShipMap
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ShipMap
Author : wingworks
Score : 269 points
Date : 2021-04-03 07:45 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.shipmap.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.shipmap.org)
| [deleted]
| zeristor wrote:
| It would be interesting to see this with more recent data.
|
| Ships taking the Northern Arctic route etc.
| jstanley wrote:
| If you click to about the middle of May and wait a few seconds,
| you get a ship flying across the middle of Africa. I wonder what
| happened there :)
| argvargc wrote:
| Saw that too, and across Europe in December.
|
| Found the answer in the sites FAQ:
|
| > Why do ships sometimes appear to move across land?
|
| > In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via
| canals or rivers that aren't visible on the map. Generally,
| though, this effect is an artefact of animating a ship between
| two recorded positions with missing data between, especially
| when the positions are separated by a narrow strip of land. We
| may develop the map to remove this effect in the future.
| nerdponx wrote:
| There's one flying over Saudi Arabia in August, too.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's a carpet.
| robinhouston wrote:
| It's lovely to see this here! I made it a few years ago; it was
| the last project we made under the Kiln banner before we devoted
| all our efforts to building a software platform (Flourish)
| instead.
|
| If anyone has any questions, AMA!
| edge17 wrote:
| Where does the data come from?
| robinhouston wrote:
| We were commissioned to make the map by the UCL Energy
| Institute, who had a research license from exactEarth for
| this historical AIS data.
|
| If you press the little info button at the top right, you get
| some basic information, including this:
|
| Where did you get the data and who paid?
|
| Our data sources for shipping positions are exactEarth for
| AIS data (location/speed) and Clarksons Research UK World
| Fleet Register (static vessel information). We are very
| grateful to our funders, the European Climate Foundation.
| tyingq wrote:
| There's some interesting anomoly at the north east top bit of
| South America (both Colombia and Venezuela) where some really
| fast boats are regularly skipping across land.
| qndreoi wrote:
| Same thing seems to be happening to Great Lakes freighters
| crossing UP of Michigan over land.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Guess: Interpolation between actual GPS samples.
| thunderbong wrote:
| I see a lot of these points going over land, even where there
| aren't any big rivers. Maybe this is a plot of the containers
| rather than the ships?
| [deleted]
| smitty1e wrote:
| Canals. Figure they have probably fixed any wobbly data.
| genezeta wrote:
| Some of the (likely) fixes look pretty weird, moving at a
| ridiculous speed, through land and sea in a straight line,
| only to reach a certain point and continue as if nothing had
| happened.
|
| e.g. 8 June 2012 05:00 from western Sahara to English
| Channel, through Sahara, right the middle of Spain, parts of
| France.
|
| Another on 9 May 2012 from Southeast Asia, straight through
| the south of India and right through the middle of Africa to
| somewhere on the Guinean Gulf in about half a day.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| That sounds to me like those ships are missing transponder
| data for some reason, and the visualisation is
| extrapolating between to distant data points.
|
| Not sure why this would be the case. Transponder turned
| off? Data missing for other reasons?
| dwheeler wrote:
| Quite possible.
|
| I've never seen a perfectly clean dataset of any
| significant size. Big datasets have all sorts of
| weirdness unless there was an extraordinary effort to
| keep them pristine.
| vonwoodson wrote:
| What you're witnessing is a self reported dataset from an
| international community (read as "unconcerned with The
| Protestant Work Ethic") of ship captains and owners.
|
| There are so many edge cases and oddities that the more you
| look the more you'll find.
|
| The moral of the story here is that you cannot accept AIS data,
| or any single data source, to be God's Truth; you must always
| skeptical of the data before your eyes, lest you fall victim to
| "The Analyst's Fallacy" (believing that the data presented is
| _all_ the data there is) and create false stories in your mind.
| s_fischer wrote:
| Couldn't a more rational theory be that the data is
| essentially captured over VHF radio waves and there can be
| data loss due to things like gaps in capture ranges, faulty
| capture devices, faulty transponders, or even signal
| congestion?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I didn't know George Tenet was on HN.
| junon wrote:
| I would wager that the data is imperfect and the points are
| tweened to discrete samples rather than having a high detail
| point-to-point path. You'll probably see traveling over land
| more like cutting a corner. Just a hunch.
| hjb wrote:
| If you go to the 12 of June 2012 you can see a ship making its
| way across the Sahara. I assume this is a data funny.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'd love it if I could fast forward to the Suez congestion
| dotancohen wrote:
| Or back to the 1967 - 74 Suez blockage.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The South China Sea looks like a traffic jam.
| graderjs wrote:
| Great live / interactive data visualization.
|
| Great voiceover narration.
|
| Weird, weird choice of pondering, melancholy rainy-day ballerina-
| dance music. Is it a British thing?
| dasudasu wrote:
| I think the point is that we're supposed to feel sad about this
| economic activity because it's emitting tons of CO2.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| further discussion from 2016
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539
| hobbescotch wrote:
| Does anyone know where they get the data for these shipping map
| sites?
| thibauts wrote:
| This site [1] allows you to get their real time global feed if
| you push your local feed in exchange. AFAIR equipment costs a
| few hundred bucks tops. I think other sites like [2] offer to
| provide a base station. Not sure what data and licensing you
| get in exchange though.
|
| [1] https://www.aishub.net/
|
| [2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/
| paulgb wrote:
| In this case, the underlying data is from exactEarth. It's not
| free data. I believe exactEarth obtains the data by reading the
| pings from the ship's transponders.
|
| https://www.exactearth.com/product-exactearth-shipview
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's free in the sense that there are projects where as long
| as you are operating an antenna feeding data, you get access
| to a feed of all data for free with the only restriction
| being you can't compete by just restreaming the complete
| feed.
| paulgb wrote:
| Oh that's interesting, thanks. So I guess it's similar to
| ADS-B exchange[1] and the like but for ships.
|
| Have you operated an antenna, by chance? I've considered
| building an ADS-B receiver to satisfy my curiosity about
| the planes I see out my window all day.
|
| [1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/
| pottertheotter wrote:
| If you want to try the ADS-B receiver, you can do it for
| < $40. It's out of stock currently, but last year I
| bought the first one on this page https://www.rtl-
| sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
|
| I got busy with other things so haven't done much with
| it, but there are some Python libraries that made ADS-B
| easy.
| dutchmartin wrote:
| Modern vessels are required to have a AIS transponder. This is
| a radio that sends the ships speed, position, angle and
| optionally their destination around by marine (VHF) radio.
| These maps are probably made by having thousands of receivers
| recording the AIS data.
| pgorczak wrote:
| There are satellite networks that can pick up AIS broadcasts
| from almost anywhere on the planet. So you can track a ship
| in the middle of the ocean with a few minutes delay. Pretty
| amazing to imagine how many signals these satellites have to
| process at once and how weak they must be after making it all
| the way into space.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| There are pirates (thieves, but I like Pirate better?) whom were
| renting luxury boats in the Mediterranean, and stealing them.
|
| They would fly to Europe, and dress like rich fancy boys.
|
| They would then rent the ships for vacation.
|
| They would take the transponder off the luxury vessel, and put it
| on a toy boat. The owner would check on his vessel, and it all
| looked fine.
|
| Meanwhile, the thieves would have the boat in Russia in a few
| days.
|
| (I believe they got 100 boats. This article reminded me of the
| caper.)
| [deleted]
| GordonS wrote:
| Hmm, this seems almost like the perfect crime - easy to pull
| off, and difficult to get caught.
|
| I wonder what protections can be made against this? Tamper-
| proofing the transponders might go some way, but a bullet-proof
| solution likely isn't possible.
| jimmyed wrote:
| This is in large part due to the attacker having physical
| access of the asset. This complicates the security. Something
| like, how do you ensure the user is not running a modded app
| to send requests to the backend?
| carstenhag wrote:
| Deposits, ID checks, regular checks, mandatory security
| guards?
| GordonS wrote:
| Deposits: would have to be a helluva deposit vs what you'd
| get for selling the boat
|
| ID checks: presumably they must already do that - I mean,
| they check your ID for hiring a car/van. I wonder if the
| criminals used stolen ID to get around this?
|
| Regular checks: on what?
|
| Security guards: you mean when you hire a boat, a security
| guard comes along for the ride? I can't see many genuine
| clients being happy about that
| antihero wrote:
| Not going to lie but this sounds far more entertaining than
| sitting at my dining room all day making computer programs.
| temp8964 wrote:
| In a broader sense, they can be considered as hackers.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Making business harder for tourists and renting places is
| neither cool nor "hacking".
| ryandrake wrote:
| It just means maybe there is a market for boat rental
| pen-testing and security consultancies. There are
| probably lots of similar vulns in the rental business's
| process, which can be demonstrated by white hats and
| corrected. In this case, it was the business incorrectly
| trusting the thieves' story and foolishly delivering a
| product they had no way to repossess.
| temp8964 wrote:
| What? Don't some computer hackers also make business
| harder for regular users? Maybe you have a very different
| definition of hacker.
| kinduff wrote:
| I lol'd. Sometimes when I read these kind of stories,
| including phishing and hacking ones, there's this tiny inner
| evil in me that wants to do bad things, but then I remember
| consequences and that being good usually pays off.
| 1-more wrote:
| Some very sketchy back of a napkin in my head math says
| that my fake email job[1] amounts to pulling off multiple
| boat heists every year without the intervention of the
| authorities (whether legitimate or--more problematic--
| illegitimate). I'm getting away with a lot here.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/Eve6/status/1341031553078448131?s=20
| rogerdickey wrote:
| what did they do with the crews? most very high end yachts come
| with a dedicated crew
| dogma1138 wrote:
| How do they sail into Russia? They would need their own AIS
| transponder and a valid ship registration, the Greek/Turkish
| maritime zone and the Black Sea has a tone of coast guard and
| military activity and you need to Lee-register/declare
| traversal.
|
| Going into Russia through the northern sea doesn't seem to be
| viable either.
| edge17 wrote:
| Or they could just turn off AIS broadcasts?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Try doing that in the Aegean not to mention the Sea of
| Marmara / Dardanelles and lets see how that works out.
|
| They might be able to sail into North Africa and then
| arrange for fake papers and ownership transfer but I would
| really like to know how they would sail into Russia without
| raising any alarms.
| serjester wrote:
| In a past life I used to take (smaller) boats from Miami into
| the Bahamas and back. Everyone always warned me that the US
| coast guard would stop any boat entering US waters but I
| couldn't tell you a single time it happened.
|
| Grant it I wasn't traveling on multi million dollar yachts,
| but sometimes what you expect to happen and what actually
| happens are two different things when it comes to enforcing
| laws.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I would assume that all bets are off once they reach
| international waters?
| dotancohen wrote:
| The Russian coast of the Black Sea can only be accessed by
| passing through Turkish waters. And the other Russian
| coasts are relatively far away, challenging, and dangerous
| to sail to in a pleasure yacht.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| To get through to Russia they need to pass territorial
| waters, you ain't getting into the Black Sea or through the
| Aegean really with your AIS turned off.
|
| Now it's even harder due to the migrant crisis the waters
| are very heavily patrolled and anything bigger than a dingy
| will light up on radar.
| euske wrote:
| Also happened to know about this site just today, thanks to the
| video by Johnny Harris (who covered a lot of geopolitical stuff
| recently). Awesome stuff.
|
| cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PbgYReEUO8
| wingworks wrote:
| Yeah that's where I found out about it too, was pretty
| surprised it was never posted on HN over the years.
| robinhouston wrote:
| It has been posted here before. I posted it when we first
| made it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539
| pbrw wrote:
| Is there any economy/strategic game about delivering goods with
| cargo ships, containers, etc.? I would love to play it.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Offworld Trading Company is close to what you're looking for i
| think. But it's not ship-centric.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Good game overall, but terrible end-game. You're playing
| along, building and making money and no obvious mistakes, and
| then all of a sudden you get the big pink screen that says
| "Sorry, someone else made more money than you and decided to
| buy you. Game over. Better luck next time!"
| shlant wrote:
| there is a board game about exactly that:
|
| https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26990/container
| ekianjo wrote:
| Ports of call
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game)
| tda wrote:
| Haven't heard that name in about 27 years. Thanks for
| bringing it up
| _ph_ wrote:
| That revives memories :) I used to play it alot on the Amiga.
| Interesting to see, that the game is still alive.
| Unfortunately currently not avialable on iOS or the Mac :(
| offtop5 wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/671440/Rise_of_Industry/
|
| I found this to be a bit difficult though. I don't think there
| are necessarily boats of this, but it does go into basic
| business logistics
| [deleted]
| hyperenergy wrote:
| Theres a game called TransOcean: The Shipping Company on Steam:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/289930/TransOcean_The_Shi...
|
| Theres a sequel to it, although I've never played it. First one
| wasn't too bad, the economics wasn't too complicated, but
| worthy of playing.
|
| Sequel:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/350110/TransOcean_2_Rival...
| madengr wrote:
| Why no traffic shown inland on the Mississippi?
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(page generated 2021-04-03 23:02 UTC)