[HN Gopher] Two containers with same number detected in Chittago...
___________________________________________________________________
Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port
Author : wolfgang42
Score : 374 points
Date : 2022-07-22 21:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (container-news.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (container-news.com)
| swamp_thing wrote:
| Haha. It's like Hacker news AI that votes things up saw container
| and port and decided it's a great devops story from Bangladesh.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And it's on cases like this you discover your (theoretically)
| unique DB key isn't
| unknownaccount wrote:
| This is horrifying.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Could you explain why?
| jw1224 wrote:
| A real-life UUID collision
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Not that terrifying when humans are involved... assuming
| competence
| dylan604 wrote:
| Assuming competence with humans involved is terrifying
| iworahipfaangs2 wrote:
| Why?
| akmarinov wrote:
| It's an identifier collision, they're supposed to be unique.
| That's what did SHA-1 in.
| mort96 wrote:
| SHA-1 is a hash function. What did it in is that there was
| found a way to make different strings hash to the same
| value. This is just someone accidentally re-using serial
| numbers, it's not a weakness in some algorithm.
| lowercase wrote:
| No it's not lmao
| intrasight wrote:
| What's really horrifying is this: "such an incident cannot be
| detected unless the boxes arrive at the same port at the same
| time"
|
| So they running this port with pencil and paper? No database?
| No sanity checks?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >So they running this port with pencil and paper? No
| database? No sanity checks?
|
| Or they simply don't run those queries until they need to.
| i.e. "we don't give a F unless there's a hiccup"
|
| The point isn't to track containers. The point is to get
| goods to where they need to be and when. Unless two of the
| same container shows up thereby causing a WTF moment there is
| no problem because there is no ambiguity in the container
| handling process and therefore they don't care.
| lazide wrote:
| Or each port does have it's own database, and so they can
| only notice a collision when two containers with the same
| ID show up at the same time?
|
| It's not like Bangladesh and Port of Los Angeles have a
| need/desire/whatever to share the same primary keys in the
| same database somewhere.
| xxpor wrote:
| How do you know this container isn't the same one you saw
| before? You need to have them at the same place at the same
| time to know they're the same container.
| intrasight wrote:
| Computers with business logic. It can't be the same one if
| it travels faster than is possible. And anyway, if they
| were being tracked ...
| LeChuck wrote:
| The terminal doesn't always know the destination. Why
| would it? And anyway, intended destinations can change.
| Paddywack wrote:
| I worked in Bangladesh for 3 years, and it is such a land of
| contrasts.
|
| The main electricity supply company at the time was running
| manual billings from a big room filled with manual general
| ledgers, one "T" account per household.
|
| It is a humbling, impoverished country with its main riches
| being its resilient, kind, resourceful people.
|
| Down the road/bay from Chittagong are the shipwrecking yards
| - a big time investment but worth watching is this...
| https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw
|
| <edit> the film I am looking for is Iron Eaters, a very human
| view of the horrific shipyards. The above film is from India,
| but still worth looking at.
| ccleve wrote:
| Thank you for the link. I just watched it in entirety. It's
| slow moving but well worth it. It's about a world I did not
| know existed.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Very watchable indeed. Great stuff!
| bloggie wrote:
| The National Film Board of Canada is one of that
| country's most culturally valuable assets.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I don't see how a database (which they're probably running
| anyway) would help, unless it's connected to all other ports
| in the world an cross-examined for duplicates.
|
| Which sounds like a lot of work and I'm not sure port
| operators want to share that, although it would be really
| cool.
| binarymax wrote:
| They should use a blockchain!
|
| I'll see myself out...
| kube-system wrote:
| Immutable ledgers only provide value when someone wants
| to fudge values. A unique constraint in a relational
| database can identify mistakes just fine.
| EUROCARE wrote:
| As long as you trust the owner, administrator and
| developer of the database. I wouldn't.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Instead you trust the developer of the blockchain and of
| all the apps required to write data to and from it.
|
| Because blockchain. Even though there are now dozens of
| instances of crypto developers messing up their own work.
| EUROCARE wrote:
| Yes indeed, trusting something I can see and compute
| myself instead of trusting someone's promises. There's no
| way blockchain will ever be worse than just having to go
| along with it because there's no way to verify.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I can see and compute myself
|
| What exactly can you see and compute? The end result in
| the blockchain is the output of <something>, where
| <something> is any number of centralized actors putting
| data from opaque sources based on extremely complex
| contracts.
| kube-system wrote:
| Run Postgres yourself. If Postgres developers are going
| to compromise their own software, it isn't going to be to
| mislabel your shipping containers.
|
| Most of the info in databases is boring and nobody cares
| about maliciously changing it it.
|
| If someone were _really_ interested in changing the
| number on your shipping container, blockchain can't
| prevent someone with a $1 can of spray paint from
| changing it.
| lazide wrote:
| It has been proposed in all serious several times - and
| then immediately the person proposing it was tarred and
| feathered, then disappeared by the relevant jurisdictions
| security services (only half kidding). I'd give you their
| names, but for some reason men wearing sunglasses and
| sitting in a van appear outside my house every time I
| consider it.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It's probably people who think we don't need gigawatts
| for a distributed ledger.
| lazide wrote:
| While they might consider THAT true, I suspect it has
| more to do with being able to track which companies and
| countries are doing what business with whom everywhere -
| especially if that includes countries they aren't
| supposed to be.
|
| Tracking containers port to port everywhere would be a
| MOUNTAIN of useful intel.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Containers are already tracked. There's literally nothing
| stopping you from saying that container X is going to
| Italy when, in fact, it's going to Iran. Blockchain isn't
| magic.
| UberFly wrote:
| Obviously one of the two containers traveled back in time. Don't
| let them touch.
| undoware wrote:
| They are the same container but the entropy is reversed
| upwardbound wrote:
| This seems indicative of a security concern. When this happens it
| could indicate someone is trying to get a container full of e.g.
| explosives or chemical weapons to be shipped to a target city
| without a paper trail. Imagine if the malicious container had
| e-ink screens on the outside that allowed the numbers to be
| changed on the fly to route the container through multiple
| untraceable steps. :(
| walrus01 wrote:
| Reminds me somewhat of getting two pieces of network equipment
| from a very cheap vendor that have identical Ethernet port MAC
| addresses. Have seen it more than once.
| [deleted]
| h2odragon wrote:
| As I recall, the 3com 3c509 sold so many copies that they
| recycled MAC addrs and hoped that the old ones wouldn't collide
| with the new ones. I had a couple hundred go through my hands
| but never caught a duplicate.
| xbar wrote:
| I recall this. I called it Metcalfe's Law.
| xsmasher wrote:
| I used to have a list of "bad" IMEI numbers and android IDs;
| there were some android phones where the whole run of that
| model would return the same identifiers.
|
| If our code found one of those "bad" ids, we'd have to pick a
| new UUID to use as an identifier for that phone and save it to
| the flash.
| lazide wrote:
| There is also a brand of Chromebooks that an entire model run
| had the exact same serial # and machine ID. Same issue.
|
| Years ago I made a large scale device data storage system,
| and one of the key design constraints I included that always
| threw people for a loop when they saw it was 'device unique
| IDs are not unique'. The system explicitly scoped all data in
| such a way that any collisions would always occur within a
| given customer that owned/controlled the device, to avoid
| data leakage, security issues, etc.
|
| Because yeah, it's amazing the corners people will cut.
|
| Last I checked, the system was still working well at 4+
| billion devices, so I guess it worked out.
| tzs wrote:
| There is a long history of identifiers being reused in world
| shipping.
|
| One of the staples of contracts class in the first year at many
| law schools is Raffles v Wichelhaus, an English contract case
| from 1864.
|
| There was a contract for someone to sell a bunch of bales of
| cotton from India to a buyer in England. The contract called for
| the cotton to be sent on a ship called the Peerless to Liverpool
| from Bombay.
|
| Unknown to both the buyer and the seller there were actually two
| different ships called Peerless both sailing from Bombay to
| Liverpool, one arriving in October and one in December.
|
| They seller was thinking of the December one when signing the
| contract, and the buyer was thinking of the October one.
|
| The buyer needed the cotton in October and when it did not arrive
| on the Peerless in October the buyer considered the contract
| broken and refused to accept the cotton that came on the December
| Peerless.
| tshaddox wrote:
| You'd think serious contracts would normally have provisions
| that would require mentioning expected dates, since late
| shipments would presumably be a common occurrence you'd want
| all parties to consider explicitly.
| raincom wrote:
| Lessons from such cases(or case law) make one specify
| expected dates.
| wahern wrote:
| According to A.W. Brian Simpson, "Contracts for Cotton to
| Arrive: The Case of the Two Ships Peerless", Contracts
| Stories, p43,
|
| > A contract for cotton "to arrive" was a contract for
| forward delivery, or, as it is sometimes called, a "time
| contract". One might expect that such a contract would
| normally specify a time for delivery. For it is the moment
| when the goods become available in the market that is of
| paramount importance to the purchaser, particularly if the
| purchaser wants the goods for use. But the world in which
| such contracts originated was one in which this was not
| really possible. Although one could discover, after an
| interval, when a sailing ship had left or, more
| approximately, proposed to leave its port of departure, it
| was very uncertain when, if ever, it would arrive at its
| destination. Even when it did arrive, there were uncertain
| delays in finding a berth to unload its cargo. Hence such
| contracts did not originally specify the time of arrival,
| much less delivery, even within some fixed period. All they
| did was to identify which shipment of cotton was being sold;
| presumably the rationale of this was that the buyer, so long
| as he knew which shipment was being sold, would be able to
| form his own estimate of the probable time of arrival. This
| would not, of course, be a point in time but a period. It is
| said that originally such contracts were made only when
| arrival was imminent, the ship typically having been reported
| off Point Lynas, which is on the north coast of Anglesey,
| some fifty miles from Liverpool. Presumably there was a
| signal station there. No doubt also cotton was sometimes sold
| as the ship lay in the river, waiting to berth. In such cases
| the date of delivery could be guessed with some precision,
| though a square-rigged vessel, if it did not employ a steam
| tug, could take a long and unpredictable time to cover even
| fifty miles.
|
| The author also provides the broader context, which is that
| this was likely a form contract in the nascent commodity
| futures market. Additionally, this occurred during a period
| of particularly overheated speculation in cotton. In other
| words, just as is common today, financial speculators were
| pushing the legal and technological envelope of the
| instruments available to them. (Futures markets go back much
| further, but the mid-19th century is in many respects when
| modern futures markets began to take on their current shape.
| He cites another source pointing out that in "'in certain
| offices in Liverpool today the futures department is still
| called the Arrivals Department.'")
| sigstoat wrote:
| well you can't stop halfway through the story. what was the
| outcome of the case?
| gsatic wrote:
| manytree wrote:
| Defendents didn't pay for the cotton
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffles_v_Wichelhaus
| yashg wrote:
| So Peerless wasn't really peerless afterall.
| jameshart wrote:
| There's the beginnings of an Abbott and Costello skit here.
|
| "I went to the pier to meet the Peerless but the cotton
| didn't appear"
|
| "Did you talk to Captain Pierre?"
|
| "Captain Pierre of the Peerless? No, the captain of the
| Peerless was Captain Pearce"
|
| "Well did you talk to Captain Pearce?"
|
| "Yes, on the pier." ...
| stevekemp wrote:
| That's strongly reminiscent of the old Two Ronnies sketch,
| about misheard orders:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV1IP4N9ajg
|
| Even now "Fork handles" will get a smile from me.
| jameshart wrote:
| I think you're right. If we add in some business about a
| portly porter who departed promptly from the port to go
| to a party while we were peering off the pier waiting for
| poor Captain Pearce of the Peerless to put in an
| appearance, I can practically hear it in Ronnie Barker's
| voice. He might be the only person who could actually get
| through the script without stumbling.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| "I need some Os!" "No! Not hose! Os!"
| bityard wrote:
| My high school english teacher ordered something that had
| cardboard cut outs of the alphabet and when it arrived, a
| few of the letters were missing.
|
| When she called the company to straighten it out, she
| said (calmly) that the packet was missing the F and G.
|
| The woman on the other end gasped and said, "we're happy
| to send you a replacement letter, but there's no need to
| be rude!"
| glimmung wrote:
| "LO! FUNEX?"
| jacquesm wrote:
| And don't call me Shirley.
| causality0 wrote:
| Sometimes I think there must be something wrong with my
| brain because for the life of me I cannot figure out what
| is funny about homophone jokes.
| jaclaz wrote:
| You are not alone, I have often the same kind of reaction
| to play-on-words.
|
| Let's see if you are sensible to other kind of humour :):
|
| https://www.marriedtothesea.com/041508/tracking-
| number-14.gi...
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| For me at least, the joke is obvious and not particularly
| humorous but the delivery by the performers is what makes
| it funny.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Exactly. Who's on first? https://youtu.be/nZ5vspsNS1g
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Naah... it was a peerless-to-peerless network.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Consequently, as there was no consensus ad idem ("meeting of
| the minds"), the two parties did not agree to the same thing
| and there was no binding contract ... therefore, the [buyer]
| did not have to pay.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We encounter this all the time at work. New customer, so new
| integration. What's your _unique_ shipment reference? This one?
| Ok fine. Go into production, and after a few months we get
| missing shipments. Support check, missing shipments have same
| reference as old shipments. "Oh, yeah we reuse the references
| after about 90 days... And, no, we don't have any globally
| unique references."
|
| This is fun when so much of the flow is based on these
| references, think goods arrival scanning, and sometimes
| shipping does take a long time so 90 days or whatever is
| cutting it close.
| auggierose wrote:
| Why would you ever reuse an identifier like that? Is there
| some kind of material cost associated with a new identifier?
| mathattack wrote:
| In some cases it's a flag that there's a mainframe
| underneath that people are afraid to touch with the number
| of digits fixed to save memory. So many other legacy
| systems assume the field is fixed that you can't add
| digits. Companies then look and say, "We can spend tens of
| millions of dollars to fix this, or we can spend the money
| on advertising and compensation, and just deal with the
| issues that come with reusing numbers"
| magicalhippo wrote:
| This is what we've never understood. Trying to ask why is
| almost always futile, the people who're there now never
| knows.
|
| I suspect it's often some legacy stuff, like a certain
| system only had 6 chars available for the reference, and so
| that's how they ended up working around it and nobody
| realized that limitation no longer exists.
|
| But yeah, does not make much sense to us either.
| david_p wrote:
| This reminds me of a project I was remotely involved
| with: Airbus having to handle an aircraft order number
| above 5 digits as they were delivering their 10'000th
| aircraft to a customer.
|
| This was a multi year project where we had to deliver
| software used to map risk and impact across the whole
| company.
|
| Imagine the costs.
|
| source: https://www.flightglobal.com/airlines/a320neo-
| line-adapts-to...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah I mean I also get that aspect. We integrate with
| many systems, we have 18 different integrations with one
| of our larger customers, and we're just a small piece of
| the puzzle.
|
| Would likely be super costly just to figure out which, if
| any, of the systems that would have to change.
| martyvis wrote:
| Is it a fully computerised B2B system? I mean when I
| order some patch cables for a project, I do it via a web
| shop and pay with my corporate credit card. The vendor
| generates an order number but also asks me for customer
| purchase order reference. I just make something up that
| might have my initials and date and a serial like
| "MV-20220723-1". Others may not be so methodical.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah this is B2B, so should be computer generated.
|
| Then again, who knows what goes on behind the scenes...
| namdnay wrote:
| Just like passenger name records - 6 characters for
| legacy reasons, so they're constantly recycled
| [deleted]
| hughes wrote:
| Even the USPS reuses tracking numbers. I had a package show
| as "delivered" before it even shipped once, because it
| received a recycled tracking number.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I don't even reuse references inside a single running
| instance of software. Using u64 you can generate billions
| a second and still not run out for hundreds of years.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Right, but u64 is kind of long for something you might
| want to read over the phone, or enter using DTMF tones.
| JonathonW wrote:
| USPS tracking numbers are at least 22 digits long
| (depending on shipping method; some can be 27); I don't
| think ease of data entry was a priority for them.
|
| 22 digits and they somehow still manage to reuse tracking
| numbers. 10^22 (or 10^20, if we assume some encoding
| overhead) valid numbers should be able to uniquely
| identify a lot of mail.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| For the ones you mention that have 22 digits, the first 8
| digits (if memory serves) identify the class of mail
| service and other metadata. So that leaves you with 10^14
| at most, assuming there's no encoding overhead / check
| digits.
|
| > USPS tracking numbers are at least 22 digits long
|
| Actually, that's wrong. There are shorter ones.
|
| Examples:
|
| 82 000 000 00 - Global Express Guaranteed
|
| EC 000 000 000 US - Priority Mail Express International
|
| CP 000 000 000 US - Priority Mail International
|
| There's also foreign shipped packages that will follow
| various standards that aren't 22 digits, yet are still
| technically a valid USPS tracking number.
| HPsquared wrote:
| They probably encode information in the code itself then,
| perhaps source/destination or similar. Perhaps to allow
| "offline" operations?
| thejosh wrote:
| A lot of the first digits are actually used for parsing.
| It's not a fully unique number.
|
| USPS labels (and other labels from other couriers) are an
| incredibly fascinating subject you would never care about
| until you work in the industry.
| thih9 wrote:
| They might need a new type of identifier to guarantee
| uniqueness. And there might be cost associated with
| updating the system (workflows, databases, scanners,
| training, etc) to deal with new type of identifiers.
| rolandog wrote:
| I'm thinking either production or the warehouse still uses
| manual stamping of lot (or shipment) numbers with those
| auto-increment stamps... The number is then captured by
| hand into a system somewhere.
|
| The system worked fine when production was X times smaller,
| but no attention has been paid to it since it was first
| designed.
| liotier wrote:
| Some legacy identifiers come in fixed length fields,
| insufficient for contemporary usage. I know a company where
| some identifier should have been lengthened long ago, but
| that would impact a couple hundred systems (and by system I
| mean whole applications, front and back) - so they keep
| plodding on with what they have and yes, it is a drag on
| operations and it causes endless hacks.
| vkk8 wrote:
| Totally different context, but at my company, they started
| reusing some IDs that are supposed to be unique because
| they ran out of them and the old-as-fuck computer systems
| can't handle longer IDs.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I have worked for a company that reused order-tracking
| identifiers. The reason was mechanical: The more digits in
| the identifier the bigger the barcode on the shipping
| label. A non-issue with 2D barcodes but back then it was an
| issue.
| [deleted]
| taneq wrote:
| Add shipping container IDs and ship IDs to the list of
| annoying human-oriented numbers that you can't assume are
| unique. :P
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Another fun one is our customers which are close to the
| border. Sure a truck's ID (plates or similar) certainly
| definitely unique, but if the other warehouse is close to
| the border as well they can make multiple trips across the
| border in a day... Good times when that truck ID alone is
| used to trigger business processes.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Information should depend on the key, the whole key, and
| nothing but the key, so help me Codd!
| asah wrote:
| (IANAL)
|
| Reading this case, I'm surprised at the outcome. The seller
| fulfilled on the terms of the contract.
|
| The contract also didn't specify the precise color or weight of
| the cotton, the exact destination, etc etc etc so the defendant
| could make similar claims to renege on the contract.
|
| Granted, time is arguably special inasmuch as it allows the
| seller to construct a scenario for fulfillment, e.g. the seller
| could've delivered 100 years later on a new boat that happened
| to be named Peerless. That's clearly not the intent.
|
| In that sense, a contract can be considered void if it doesn't
| reasonably specify time.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In that sense, a contract can be considered void if it
| doesn't reasonably specify time.
|
| The judgment states pretty clearly that a contract is void if
| the two parties, at the time they made the contract, did not
| agree on what it meant.
|
| > the moment it appears that two ships called the "Peerless"
| were about to sail from Bombay there is a latent ambiguity,
| and parol evidence may be given for the purpose of shewing
| that the defendant meant one "Peerless," and the plaintiff
| another. That being so, there was no consensus ad idem, and
| therefore no binding contract.
|
| [The words are from the defendant's lawyer, but the court
| appears to have agreed immediately.]
|
| So this isn't formally a "win" for the defendant - formally,
| there never was a contract, and the suit was dismissed for
| failure to state a claim.
| sporkland wrote:
| I felt bad for the seller for a while. Then I realized they
| probably just sold the cotton to someone else, and that
| fungibility and liquid markets make a lot of this stuff less
| risky on both sides.
| retcon wrote:
| I think that all the analysis I've found with a quick
| search isn't very helpful.
|
| The seller had to sue to either obtain payment or void the
| contract or else spend energies and time pursuing payment
| by persuasion whilst the entire time granting the
| ostensible buyers a free call option on FOB Liverpool
| cotton. My cynical guess is that regardless of evidence of
| foreknowledge about the duplicate ship names, Lloyds
| Register [0] most certainly did exist and importantly was
| considerably more accessible from Liverpool than India.
| Seller's imperative wasn't recompense but prior to
| marketing the cargo and taking profit, obtaining title and
| clean hands. Why go to so much effort? Letters of credit
| access and costs issues that could have been affected by a
| impossible distance impedance to necessary restorative PR.
|
| [0] https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/archive-library/lloyds-
| regis...
|
| Edit:.. evidence of foreknowledge..
| ghaff wrote:
| I wonder how this has played out in the doubtless many
| other contract law cases. If this was really a case of
| (apparent) confusion on both sides, really not much
| hard/foul to either, so just void the contract. I assume
| you might see a different result if there was significant
| hard that fell disproportionately on one party.
| rebuilder wrote:
| But the price was probably settled well in advance, so the
| seller was left taking on market risk, which depending on
| the way things went, could have been anything between a bad
| loss or a nice windfall. Less likely the latter, I would
| expect, since they were forced to sell the cotton in Bombay
| or cover the cost of transport elsewhere.
| ghaff wrote:
| >But the price was probably settled well in advance, so
| the seller was left taking on market risk,
|
| No. That was the whole problem. It was for market price
| when the cargo arrived and the price of cotton jumped
| between October and December. So the buyer didn't want it
| any longer and basically claimed they thought it was
| going to be on the October boat.
| rossmohax wrote:
| If shipping was done under now void contract, will transport
| company be paid at all?
| aasasd wrote:
| Annoyingly, the top image is of some random containers, and not
| of any of those two. This is just dumb and useless.
| remflight wrote:
| Can someone please explain the significance?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Between oops and sus.
|
| In this case, it appears to be a mistake. That a number was
| accidentally reused.
|
| But a concern could also be fraud, theft, smuggling, etc. A
| "bad" container that was supposed to fly under radar mocked up
| to look legit if anyone checked.
| lr wrote:
| As Cory Doctorow once said, "It is only a matter of time before a
| computer kills us."
| rossmohax wrote:
| So a bit of a paint on container is used for routing? How
| feasible it is for criminals to repaint number on a container
| enroute to divert it and therefore steal its content?
| jameshart wrote:
| Imagine if software engineering ID allocation failures made
| frontpage news in the trade press.
|
| "An object reference was discovered to be null today in a web
| browser window in Frankfurt. Officials said the problem was
| discovered when some JavaScript application code attempted to
| read a property from the object reference."
| kaidon wrote:
| LOL... my mind went straight to "Two identical UUIDs were
| generated for containers running in a Kubernetes cluster which
| powers Chittatong's infrastructure, wiping out everything in
| the process".
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Funnily enough it was probably a crash in some system that
| generates the numbers, that caused the duplication.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I just had the very same thought reading the article!
|
| "An admin at a local it shop discovered two 3com nics with the
| same Mac address while setting up a rack of four new servers.
| The admin got suspicious when reliable network communication
| was not possible with any of the two servers and after further
| investigation found the duplicate addresses."
| ntac wrote:
| In the late 90s I worked for a company that was afraid of the
| Internet. They had one computer in a common area that had
| access to the Internet but not the company's internal network
| for the ~50 engineers to use.
|
| The internal network was coax Ethernet. I was working on a
| networking project at the time and ran a packet sniffer on
| the internal network and saw that some MAC addresses could
| access the outside world.
|
| I'm lazy and I didn't like having to go halfway across the
| building, sit at a slow ass computer to download a datasheet,
| copy it to a floppy, then walk halfway across the building
| back to my cube, and finally copy it to my computer. Ain't
| nobody got time for that.
|
| So I modified my network driver to use one of the macaddrs
| that had internet access. When I needed something from the
| Internet, I'd load my modified driver then unload it when I
| was done. Much easier.
|
| I thought I was doing it for such short periods of time that
| nobody works ever notice. Of course I was wrong.
|
| After about a month I got called into the IT manager's
| office. And of course the the macaddr I picked belonged to
| the VP of engineering who also was the son of the president.
|
| Fortunately they understood that young engineers are dumb and
| do dumb things and let me off with a warning.
| richardfey wrote:
| On the contrary, I think you did a smart thing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This would only be discovered if two nics with the same mac
| addresses arrive in the same shop at the same time.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I'm not sure if your quote is from personal experience but...
| and this is totally cliche from the era... I was setting up a
| Beowulf Cluster made up of salvage 486s in the early 2000s
| because why not? We were running into some really bizarre
| issues, and eventually we got down to the just pinging the
| machines from each other and started discovering that when we
| went to ping one of them, we would get two replies!
|
| Sure enough, two generic NE2K NICs had duplicated MAC
| addresses!
| c0nsumer wrote:
| I've had this problem in modern times where, when setting
| up Windows PCs (via WinPE at our enterprise) some NICs
| would very occasionally not work right with the provided
| driver and end up with some default MAC.
|
| Doesn't work out so well when you have a room full of these
| PCs all getting imaged at thhe same time and suddenly half
| a dozen on the same switch have the same MAC. :\
|
| (I believe it came down to a BIOS problem and a new version
| sorted it out.)
| thaeli wrote:
| Ha, yeah. I had the same experience, around the same time,
| also on a Beowulf cluster.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Beowulf Cluster. I just died and woke up in the 90s
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Naturally, it started as a joke. My buddy had a pile of
| machines that the school board had decided to throw away.
| Being avid /. fans, I of course said "can you imagine a
| Beowulf cluster of those?"
|
| So then it's 2am and his basement closet is really
| warm...
| twoxproblematic wrote:
| TheCoreh wrote:
| They do sometimes :)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Gives a whole new* meaning to "This program has performed an
| illegal operation and will be shut down."
|
| *Well new-ish. The first time I saw that message as a child
| playing a game on Windows I freaked out and immediately turned
| off the computer. I was terrified the computer did some illegal
| math and I was going to be arrested!
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| me too!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of this part of Wes Borg's "Welcome to the
| Internet Help Desk" routine:
|
| https://youtu.be/1LLTsSnGWMI?t=240
| addingnumbers wrote:
| That routine is so old, the last time I saw it I downloaded
| it over Napster and opened it with realplayer
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup. But still funny as hell (if you ignore the
| references to dated tech).
| protastus wrote:
| Like a new (std::nothrow) meaning!
|
| ... I'll let myself out.
| saary wrote:
| Reading your comment. I had "PC LOAD LETTER" jump to mind.
| minitoar wrote:
| I learned that PC in this context means "paper cartridge".
| [deleted]
| slivanes wrote:
| More likely to be undefined, not null.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Or:
|
| _Nearly 150,000 children we 're orphaned today when their
| parents were tragically lost in a catastrophic data importation
| process. Heartless DBA's were nonchalant as they spoke to the
| children of their parents being merely "redundant backups"._
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| What are the odds?
| thrill wrote:
| 100%
| onionisafruit wrote:
| More like 98%. There's a chance this article is satire. It
| certainly reads like satire.
| mattanimation wrote:
| Dexter?
| [deleted]
| arecurrence wrote:
| The manufacturer reused identifiers (5 to be precise) in a later
| batch. This was a manufacturing error rather than a freak
| collision.
|
| Edit: Source https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/two-
| containers-sa...
|
| "Five containers of the second batch have numbers akin to another
| five belonging to the previous batch, according to Borhan."
| Pxtl wrote:
| Whenever I see somebody detailing the scope of a mistake at
| their business, I mentality add the words "at least" to any
| quantities.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I add it to the person instead.
|
| "Five containers of the second batch have numbers akin to
| another five belonging to the previous batch, according to
| Borhan, at least."
|
| This is much more reassuring because it just looks like
| Borhan needs to get his shit together. Optimism!
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| >Salam said that it is not possible to identify the number of
| boxes with double-up numbers without the report from the Chinese
| manufacturer.
|
| Sounds troubling.
| wheybags wrote:
| I always wondered if there isn't someone out there making dodgy
| devices with mac addresses in someone else's range.
| giobox wrote:
| Many years ago I worked for a major cellphone service provider
| in Europe - cellphones with duplicate IMEI numbers were an
| issue (the IMEI number was meant to be unique per cellular
| device much like a MAC address). This occasionally prevented an
| IMEI block on a stolen phone.
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| IIRC that's what some manufacturers did. However, rather than
| squatting in someone's existing range, they ended up squatting
| in unused ranges that were unlikely to be assigned anytime soon
| (back in those days the assignments were sequential). IEEE
| ended up cracking down on this by randomizing OUI assignments.
| randomfool wrote:
| Years ago I bought a bag of Bluetooth 4.1 USB dongles for
| development only to find every single one of them had the same
| MAC address. Ugh.
| dspillett wrote:
| Many years ago I encountered cheap knock-off network cards1
| that had default MACs in the range of a big known name brand,
| and as far as I know it wasn't some cross-
| branding/affiliate/other deal. So yes, there has been and no
| doubt still is.
|
| [1] in fact, back in my student days most NICs I had were cheap
| knock-off versions, the "real" things were not the inexpensive
| items they are today. This predates it being common to have one
| built into your motherboard, even more expensive ones, by some
| time.
| linuxlizard wrote:
| Several years ago I worked for a company that made a
| usb+network and usb-only skew of their product. The usb-only
| boards were the same as the usb+network boards with a few parts
| not populated.
|
| We started getting tech support complaints when we sold the
| product into China. Turns out, an enterprising vendor bought a
| single usb+network printer, desoldered the EEPROM (containing
| the ethernet mac address). Then that vendor bought usb-only
| (cheaper) products, added the additional parts and bulk copied
| the single eeprom image (with the mac address) onto the new
| products, selling them as the more expensive usb+network sku.
| Result: a dozen+ of our product running on the LAN with the
| same mac address.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Sorry to side-track this, but does anyone know if there is a
| reason why we make homophone spelling errors? Do we sound
| words out as we write them? Neurologically, what is
| happening? It doesn't sound automatically the case that the
| pathways for concept -> word -> write actually flow through a
| concept -> word -> sound -> write path. It's not a confusion
| of the word since this user clearly knows SKU is not SKEW.
|
| And /u/linuxlizard, if you don't mind saying, were you using
| speech-to-text to write that comment?
| linuxlizard wrote:
| SKU Stock Keeping Unit. Sorry. Vs Skew. I probably am using
| the word "SKU" wrong but it's what we called the slight
| variations of product.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stock-keeping-unit-
| sku....
| renewiltord wrote:
| No no. I know what you meant and it's a harmless typo
| obviously.
| linuxlizard wrote:
| Typos are what happens when I post too quickly while
| waiting for my app to boot.
| munk-a wrote:
| A decent proportion of the population frequently run
| internal monologues in the voiced manner - when I'm typing
| this out I can hear (not actually hear but mentally hear)
| someone speaking the words as I type. I assume the
| frequency of homophone typos are due primarily to this -
| since both skew and SKU are identical in my inner monologue
| and I'm trusting my fingers to choose the right
| combination.
|
| I think homophone spelling errors are a different issue
| though - english education in the US is really quite poor
| so a lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and
| spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large -
| people will hear a term in conversation and start using it
| in their own speech, when they arrive at typing it out
| they'll make their best guess at spelling and it'll
| probably end up a roll of the dice which homophone their
| spell-check ends up shoveling them towards.
|
| 1. _/ me types while admitting they constantly type in
| spoken english - preferring the spoken sentence
| construction rules_. Something something glass houses and
| stones.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Thanks for answering. Of course, I have the opposite of
| your second sentence, mispronouncing words I've only ever
| read :)
| munk-a wrote:
| Ah, I still internally mispronounce Quay - no matter how
| hard I try and relearn it as KEY.
| kortilla wrote:
| > english education in the US is really quite poor so a
| lot of grammatical rules[1] (they're/their/there) and
| spelling aren't really well impressed on society at large
|
| This is false. It was impressed into us many times
| throughout grade, middle, and high school. People just
| don't care enough to get the right spelling because they
| were using the words natively long before they learned to
| spell them.
| pokey00 wrote:
| Backing this up- I see that complaint all the time about
| US education, but I know me and all my peers had this
| impressed on us throughout our (public) schooling. People
| just don't care because to them, the word is right but
| the spelling part is a formality that can be ignored.
| mariuolo wrote:
| For what it's worth, I started making homophonic spelling
| errors after my English improved.
|
| I wonder if I'm unconsciously mimicking errors from
| others, or if something in my brains has changed.
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, there's a ton of people using Xerox's 00:00:00
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The container in question is SLHU4500470. The first four
| characters are the owner, the next 6 digits are the unique (per
| owner) number, and the last digit is a check digit.
|
| Somehow I always assumed there'd be more than 6 digit IDs for
| these things. I'd guess collisions have happened, but never been
| caught in the same port before.
| watchdogtimer wrote:
| I believe the 4th character of a container ID is always a U, so
| the container owner is the first 3 characters.
| robk wrote:
| U is code for freight container so yes :)
| hakfoo wrote:
| I always wondered if this was designed to integrate into the
| existing railway numbering system. In the US, at least, owner
| identifiers are pretty consistently 4 characters or less, and
| individual unit numbers are 6 digits or less (i. e. BNSF
| 123456).
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _"I have never seen two containers carrying the same number
| in my 27 years of career in the shipping sector,"_ pointed out
| Mohammed Abdullah Jahir, chief operating officer of Saif
| Maritime Ltd, adding that such an incident cannot be detected
| unless the boxes arrive at the same port at the same time.
|
| If the port authority conducting the inspection are not
| diligent, it's easy to miss this.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| What happens when somebody has more than a million containers?
| 6 digits doesn't seem enough to guarantee uniqueness.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Ahem, 10 million
| jffry wrote:
| The 7th digit is a checksum digit, as previously noted. So
| only 6 "free" digits so a million is correct.
|
| You can read more about the container numbering standard
| here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Thanks for the info
| throw0101a wrote:
| Like IEEE OUIs, one company can have multiple owner prefixes.
| Maersk has 41:
|
| * https://www.bic-code.org/bic-company-
| search/?searchterm=MAER...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346
| cortesoft wrote:
| You assign a second owner number to the group, probably
| addaon wrote:
| There's only about six million active containers in the
| world. If one owner has more than a sixth of them, an easy
| fix would be to issue them a second owner code, basically
| extending the six-digit field by a bit.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _> There 's only about six million active containers in the
| world._
|
| Huh, that's a lot less than I expected there to be.
| contravariant wrote:
| Though that's about 1 per 1000 people, and if you imagine
| how much stuff you'd end up with using all that a
| container could carry when constantly in use, I guess
| about a thousandth of that isn't too weird an amount.
| elevaet wrote:
| 6 million seems like a underestimate. There are meant to be
| 54k container ships in the world. That would mean an
| average of 110 containers per ship, and ignores all of the
| ones in use on land. Some of those ships can carry 24k
| containers _each_.
| walrus01 wrote:
| There are not at all a vast number of 8,000 TEU+ ships
| however. Small enough that any one ship owning company
| might have a few dozen at most. Evergreen says it has
| something like 150 ships.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Evergreen is still growing, though; They've got several
| 8,000+ TEU ships set to launch in the next few years.
| Consolidation is key.
|
| I would guess that the next answer is "Evergreen gets
| multiple Owner codes", because that's a real simple way
| to stretch it, but...
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Wikipedia says 20.5 million _in 2012_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_container
|
| This was their source. Apparently not updated since that
| 2012 survey: https://www.csiu.co/resources-and-links/world-
| container-flee...
| munk-a wrote:
| Well, we'd probably just switch over to UUIDs since those
| things are practically infinite and we've now got a lot of
| well established infrastructure in place for handling them.
| fshr wrote:
| Nope, that many characters would be impractical in daily
| use. There's a lot of copying, pasting, reading, and
| reciting of numbers via email/web/phone/TMS/WMS/etc.
| mds wrote:
| Sounds like the setup for a William Gibson novel.
| dheera wrote:
| Meh? Maybe the customs should stop caring.
| smm11 wrote:
| Either this is a legit warp in the space-time continuum, or it
| simply is what it is.
| antonymy wrote:
| The minute I started reading I was waiting for the phrase "made
| in China" to appear. It's in the 7th paragraph: " M Salam noted
| that the mistake occurred when containers were made for Sea Lloyd
| in China."
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm surprised it was "buried" that deep.
| blamazon wrote:
| Something like 97% of shipping containers are made in China.
| This is presumably not lost on regular readers of container-
| news.com.
| midislack wrote:
| trustingtrust wrote:
| Maybe relevant:
|
| https://youtu.be/BSe9JDVczUc
|
| Containers are at play here.
| bluehorseray wrote:
| Glad to finally see https://container-news.com/ hit the front
| page on HN
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| surprised but really not to see people so passionate and
| dedicated to containers. warms my heart, really best thing to
| ever happen.
| kingcoleman wrote:
| smarx007 wrote:
| Wrong containers!
| yetanother-1 wrote:
| Still good lesson learned.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| This is legit one of the things I love most about HN, articles
| might be 80% about tech, but the content in the remaining 20%
| can be about pretty much anything, and it's always fascinating
| to get insight into other domains. Never considered that
| containers were numbered, let alone that a number clash is a
| significant incident, but thinking about it, yeah it makes
| sense.
| hadlock wrote:
| This is kind of what big chunks of the internet were like
| back in the late 90s, very early 2000s, particularly before
| smart phones.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I suspect it's tied up in the shift of quantity/scope of
| "user generated content". News articles and blog-posts etc.
| got somewhat pushed out by "look at this cute cat photo I
| allegedly took myself", etc.
| permo-w wrote:
| as HN evidences, this stuff is all still there (possibly
| more than ever), it's just drowning in an ocean of
| content aimed at pleasing children, Google's algorithm,
| and the less intellectually-inclined
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _big chunks of the internet ... particularly before smart
| phones_
|
| Then, IMEI numbers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Maybe a rare opportunity to plug one of my favorite non-fiction
| books, _The Box_ , about how shipping containers restructured
| global trade.
|
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...
| jacquesm wrote:
| And much more than trade. It had effect on road
| infrastructure, various temporary constructs including school
| rooms for emergency situations and housing as well.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And product dimensions, e.g. for aircraft, cars, military
| equipment,... Being able to ship in standard containers
| makes a lot of things so much easier
| ashildr wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning this book!
| hedora wrote:
| So, if I understand things correctly, the root cause of the
| global shipping meltdown is that someone used that field as a
| database primary key?
| lamontcg wrote:
| When I worked at Amazon we found two NICs with the same MAC
| address.
|
| And that was a long time ago with a comparatively very small
| server count compared to today.
|
| Someone's manufacturing database probably had a tiny race
| condition.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| I'm having trouble finding a reference just now, but the MAC
| address for a modem-based link on Windows had "DESK" until it
| started causing real trouble. And one of those problems was
| that GUIDs were obtained by using "the MAC address" of the PC
| as an input to a DEC-Intel-Xerox-Microsoft algorithm. Around
| the time of this coming to a head, it came up that some
| manufacturers were out of MAC addresses for whatever reason,
| and also that some manufacturers were assuming that two random
| NICs on an Ethernet would not both be one of $MANUFACTURER's
| cards, so care was not necessary.
| halestock wrote:
| I used to work for a company that sold labels for various third
| party printer manufacturers, and let me tell you, some of them
| were VERY lazy when it came to assigning MAC addresses.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| yep, not unheard of for cheap unbranded devices to _all_ have
| the same MAC, unfortunately.
| toast0 wrote:
| MACs are _supposed_ to be globally unique, but they only
| _really_ need to be broadcast domain unique, so you can get
| away with using the same MAC for a lot of devices as long
| as most people don 't use two on one LAN.
| cricalix wrote:
| 20-odd years ago, the college I attended (and worked for) was
| outfitting one of the computer labs with new network cards;
| migrating from Token Ring to Ethernet as I recall. To do this,
| 3COM cards had been bought by the boxful.
|
| We replaced all of the cards, and booted the lab. 1 machine got
| an IP and then it all went to hell. Every single machine showed
| up with the same MAC. Think we had to rip and replace to fix
| it.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I worked for a company that made a networking product and we
| managed to build 1,000 units with the same MAC address (we had
| a big block of assigned addresses) because of a
| miscommunication with the vendor who provided the preprogrammed
| microcontrollers..
|
| Luckily the MAC was in a rewritable location so it was
| possible, if a royal pain in the ass, to reprogram them all.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I do not understand why they are not using solutions to this
| known problem?
|
| If it is just a matter of unique identifier, a UUID4 or similar
| could be used.
|
| I guess that they need some control digits, there are solutions
| for that too.
| tillinghast wrote:
| Ooof. dockerd is gonna be _pissed_.
| sabas_ge wrote:
| The global platform which should solve the issue is opt in for
| container manufacturers, not mandatory https://www.bic-
| boxtech.org/
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder how common actually duplicated serial numbers are in
| various things. In some cases they do matter, but in many others
| not really. Think of the non-smart devices.
|
| And it can often be simple human error. Some fat fingers the
| wrong range in morning, forgets to list the used codes, reads the
| wrong line, some glitch preventing machine from saving the last
| used code...
|
| Just remember how much stuff is made by cheapest possible
| bidders, who might not be so much interested to deliver best work
| always.
| rwky wrote:
| Somewhere I worked used the wrong serial numbers of postal
| delivery. We had an overflow which no one noticed for about a
| year and we ended up using the same range as another customer
| of the postal company. There were thousands of parcels with
| duplicated serials, everything arrived fine and as far as I
| know there's been no real admin issues either. So in this case
| it didn't matter.
| namecheapTA wrote:
| I worked at a small "automall" of several dealerships. Our system
| operated inventory numbers based on the last 6 digits of the
| vin#. Sounds like with 1 million options, you'd be fine. It
| didn't take long for duplicates to start coming up when you have
| hundreds of cars in stock, and sell hundreds a month. Let alone
| the problem with a car being sold new, and then being traded back
| in. That was fine, because we had a different leading digit for
| new vs used. But you'd be surprised how often a used car gets
| sold, and then traded in again at the same place. Now what number
| does it get? The same one. Fine, atleast they're not both in
| stock at the same time. Great. Sell it again. Then when a
| customer calls six months later, try and lookup the deal your
| most common way... Oh ya.. now I've got 4 possible deals for this
| car.
| vgeek wrote:
| Is Frank Sobotka wanted for questioning? Or is Ziggy more likely
| to blame?
| ortusdux wrote:
| It sounds like the actual unique number is only 6 digits long and
| chosen by the manufacturer, so it could either be a mistake or
| identical randomly generated numbers. My math is a bit rusty -
| how you you solve the birthday problem for 1mil instead of 365?
|
| https://containertech.com/articles/shipping-container-number...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
| gruez wrote:
| Using the formula on wikipedia and checking random numbers it
| looks like the number required for 50% chance of collision is
| around 1200.
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%2...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#A_simple_expo...
| vecter wrote:
| I think you meant to link to 1-(999999/1e6)^(1178 choose 2)
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F100000
| 0%2...
| [deleted]
| jhugo wrote:
| It's a mistake. They keep track of numbers they've already
| used, but in this case failed to do so properly.
| amenghra wrote:
| You can approximate the birthday paradox by taking the square
| root. So 1mil gives you ~1000. 365 is ~19 (the actual value is
| 23).
| jfim wrote:
| 1178. This is actually part of the base stats package in R:
| > qbirthday(prob = 0.5, classes = 1000000, coincident = 2)
| 1178
|
| See
| https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stats/versions/3.6.2...
| kgermino wrote:
| It's worth noting the full number isn't just the six digits
| (plus checksum) but the full number including the letters that
| indicate owner and type, so a single owner wouldn't give two of
| their containers the same number.
|
| That said, how many containers is one company likely to own?
| 1,000,000 is a big number but it seems like some of the big
| logistics companies could flirt with that. Doors anyone know if
| they have multiple "owner codes" or an I just way overriding
| the scale here?
| runnerup wrote:
| Maersk has a capacity to ship 4 million containers at once. I
| suspect you'd generally have 3-4x that many because they
| spend a lot of time waiting around and also just pile up in
| Los Angeles because no one needs to ship (as much) stuff back
| to China.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Doors anyone know if they have multiple "owner codes" or
| an I just way overriding the scale here?_
|
| Like IEEE OUIs, one company can have multiple owner prefixes.
| Maersk has 41:
|
| * https://www.bic-code.org/bic-company-
| search/?searchterm=MAER...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346
| wolpoli wrote:
| Right. So what happens when we face container number
| exhaustion and we found out that some C developers have
| been using char id[12]?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I suspect they'll move to Container.v6 and that everyone
| will dislike because the values are harder to read to
| say... then the industry will take an additional decade
| or two to actually start to use it.
| katbyte wrote:
| We are approaching decade 3 of ipv6 and ipv4 is still the
| majority of internet traffic.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > [...] _ipv4 is still the majority of internet traffic._
|
| Not if you're on mobile. Lots of cell networks only give
| IPv6 addresses to phones.
|
| E.g., T-Mobile in the US:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE
| smcl wrote:
| Being a bit more kind, ipv6 only really started to get
| moving in the wild around ~2010 so we are at the start of
| the second decade. It has climbed steadily since this
| point and will be the majority globally within a couple
| of years. It is already the majority of traffic in the
| USA, Germany, France and India.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Here's the derivation of a formula by Matt Might
|
| https://matt.might.net/articles/counting-hash-collisions/
| mlyle wrote:
| Cheap approximation is square root.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yep, and it's pretty close in this case: for a 50% chance, a
| sample of 1178 containers with 6-digit numbers (assuming a
| uniform distribution) would suffice.
| notorandit wrote:
| Forma single case spotted out, i wonder how many other cases can
| be found with a thorough worldwide investigation.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| The best part for me was discovering that a site called
| "container news" exists.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| I literally looked at the domain and exclaimed out loud
| "container news dot com?!?!?!"
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| And it has an app!
|
| This website actually has some pretty good news too. Didn't
| know protests/strikes were still happening around California.
| [deleted]
| thebradbain wrote:
| I absolutely love industry-specific news sites / communities.
| Hacker News itself is one (duh), but to me it's most
| fascinating seeing "non-tech" industries have some sort of
| digital (or sometimes even a regular print paper, if it's niche
| enough) presence. Obviously it's not surprising when you think
| about it that an industry would have its ways to spread news --
| but these industries are so out of my orbit that it's always
| novel to stumble upon.
|
| e.g. Freight Trucking is one that has a particularly robust
| network of competing news sites
| https://www.freightwaves.com/news/category/trucking,
| https://www.ttnews.com/, https://www.thetrucker.com/
|
| To anyone else who finds this interesting, and I'm not
| exaggerating, -- if there's any cool industry hubs you find,
| please send them my way.
| wishfish wrote:
| https://gcaptain.com/
|
| I like GCaptain. It's shipping news in a nice format. Started
| reading it during the Suez blockage.
|
| Almost makes me wish I worked in that industry. Logistics,
| especially when ship borne, is rather interesting.
| WebbWeaver wrote:
| I'm trying to build a library of niche news websites. Thanks
| for these.
|
| what hubs are you interested in?
| arwineap wrote:
| Is it public?
| Aperocky wrote:
| Should've just used UUIDs, could probably turned all of Earth
| into containers and not had a collision.
| Joe_Boogz wrote:
| Not should've, definitely would not have had a collision.
| anewpersonality wrote:
| Why is this a big deal.. a signal of the end of the world
| perhaps? Or nefarious forces at play?
| jldugger wrote:
| I imagine it would be a bigger deal if they had the same seal.
| _That_ would suggest someone was trying to steal cargo, or
| commit some kind of customs fraud.
| _3u10 wrote:
| It's like having two cars with the same plate
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Isn't it more like 2 cars with the same VIN? The plate in
| this analogy would be the seal.
| isatty wrote:
| Sounds like it, but I'm still interested in finding out how
| big a deal it is. A quick search shows that there have been
| cars found with duplicate VINs and making a container with
| the same serial number seems like pretty pedestrian crime
| in comparison. That is not to say that this is a crime,
| could just be plain old manufacturing mistakes and it's
| also obvious that not all container management systems
| check for it (even if it did, unless both end up in the
| same registry it won't matter anyway).
| _3u10 wrote:
| It's not a big deal per se but is a sign of a potential
| big deal. Or a minor f'up
| 13of40 wrote:
| Unless that number is the only thing they're using to route
| the container, it's more like having two guys named "Joe".
| danielodievich wrote:
| I have a custom license plate on my car in my state. A friend
| of mine told me they saw the same custom license plate on the
| same vehicle make/model in another state. The only bummer was
| that that car's color was red, whereas mine is yellow. So two
| cars with same plate is totally doable if issuing authorities
| are different. Two cars with same plate from same issuing
| authority, that's the problem
| kube-system wrote:
| There are special cases where two (or hundreds of!) cars
| can have the same plate.
|
| https://patch.com/img/cdn20/getty/22887410/20200526/033010/
| s...
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/content/archive-
| images/ap_111036136...
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| oh no! now how will they track us!!
| Pakdef wrote:
| > _3u10 - It's like having two cars with the same plate
|
| I wish I could have the same plate as everyone else... or no
| plate at all like Steve Jobs used to do
| (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-
| ceo-l...).
|
| This is a completely different issue.
| kurofune wrote:
| A tragic day for all my fellow containerheads.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Those containers are going to be worth so much on the
| collector's market though. Like that stamp with the upside down
| plane on it.
| [deleted]
| smarx007 wrote:
| I understand that ports don't share container info with each
| other and manufacturers don't have a crystal ball to see all
| container IDs of a given customer but given that first 3 chars
| identify a shipping company, I have hard time understanding how
| the shipping company failed to catch this. How did they manage to
| create two waybills for two containers with the same serial?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Generating a waybill raises exception. It is Friday night and
| everyone else is already at the bar. Drop the unique constraint
| and call it day.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Ok but still: as a user, how do you even know that there are
| two containers with the same id? In other words, a human
| needs to have way of telling them apart.
|
| Even if two entries showed up with the same id, I'd assume as
| a user it's a glitch and would not put two different
| shipments into what I would assume is a duplicate entry for
| the same container.
| biryani_chicken wrote:
| I'd assume the containers were labeled at different ports
| and by chance got sent to the same port. So the persons
| looking at the containers only had one to worry about. And
| with both going to the same destination one person probably
| shrugged when they saw the origin port was somewhere else.
| mrandish wrote:
| I don't know anything about shipping containers but I'd assume
| that the container owning company had the two doppel-containers
| enter service at different times and/or locations and their
| asset database either isn't centralized or isn't de-duped.
| zeroimpl wrote:
| I've seen this type of thing happen a few times. Usually a
| combination of a human error at the factory plus flaky
| backend systems that like to do upserts.
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| Playbook on how to handle a uuid collision
| vivegi wrote:
| Just yesterday I was reading about Time-of-creation/Time-of-use
| (TOCTOU) race conditions in symlinks
| (https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/).
|
| The manufacturer's new container-id generation logic probably
| has/had this category of issue (i.e., TOCTOU).
| gurjeet wrote:
| While TOCTOU is used to describe the problem encountered by
| software in general, an almost identical problem in lock-free
| data-structures is called the ABA problem.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem
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