The invisible language of trains, boats, and planes | Hacker News Reader

The invisible language of trains, boats, and planes

bbc.com

64 pointswilliamhpark8 comments

Most of these signals are not so secret, as demonstrated at this DEFCON presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuNOD3XWp4A

We changed the title to what the URL says, which is more neutral.

There is a map to track vessels: http://www.marinetraffic.com/

AIS is generally limited to line of sight, as the signals simply don't carry. (AIS was designed to be a high-frequency report over relatively short distances; carrying was never a design goal.) However, there are providers for ship AIS data which have satellites listening for the radio broadcasts over open water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_Syste...

http://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite-ais

In case people don't know, the reason for this is that AIS uses an already existing VHF channel (and on recreational craft sometimes even shares the antenna). AIS is to keep ships from running in to each other. It works great for that. Even on my 34' sailboat I use different means to keep land-based people aware of my location when at sea.

It's pretty easy to see a lot of AIS signals near land using MarineTraffic.com. Since it depends on land-based receivers it's not very up to date sometimes. It's got me 20 miles away right now since there's no closer receiver and that's where I was a few days ago. They do have higher level commercial plans with satellite data access.

What if I need to know about a ship out of line of sight in an emergency at sea? Then I'd call the USCG and they'd check AMVERS for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMVER

Given recent issues with piracy, it's not really a good idea to have a big publicly available database of where relatively slow moving ocean vessels are at a given time. Even if you had all of the world's AIS signals you'd find some gaps in certain parts of the world where vessels switch to receive-only mode.

Was expecting an article about packet transport networks, and signaling protocols like RSVP or LDP.

You can see crowdsourced ADS-B data at https://www.flightradar24.com; it's a pretty cool visualization, and far more accurate than other flight trackers.

Someone's asleep at the switch - from the BBC Stylebook:

"Enormity - Use ‘enormity’ only in its traditional sense of ‘wickedness’ (eg the enormity of Harold Shipman’s crimes soon became apparent). Do not use ‘enormity’ to mean ‘hugeness’."

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