Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnLeTigre | Hacker News Reader

As guess this would qualify as great news for sea-faring pirates.

Pirates are after hostages, not cargo, generally. It's very hard to crack the cargo anyways - it's usually stored in a solid steel 20-to-40 foot shipping container with solid steel lashings bolting everything together. You'd need to be able to cut through a lot of steel, but then moving the actual cargo itself would require, well, a large vessel. Selling it would be a very involved process. All of this puts sea piracy of drone vessels well outside of the scope of a group of armed men in a motorboat.

Potentially you could also establish measures that make it hard for a human to get aboard the ship, such as no walkable spaces, or tall fences, now that you no longer need to accommodate human crew.

And no crew that you could threaten to obtain the keys to move freely.

Also, an armed rescuing force would have no hostages to worry about.

No one to threaten to make the ship stop either. There's a fair chance a would-be pirate would end up in Hamburg.

And if they do stop the ship, no point sending in an armed rescue force. Just park a destroyer outside and wait for the pirates to run out of food.

For that matter, you tell the ship to report to the destroyer.

It's very hard to crack the cargo anyways - it's usually stored in a solid steel 20-to-40 foot shipping container with solid steel lashings bolting everything together.

The other plan would be go on board and reprogram the ship to go elsewhere, the nearest deserted coast say, maybe carry the ship's beacons a ways away in a different direction before dumping them in the sea.

I'm sure if you crash a whole container ship on the coast of Somalia, your confederates could manage to get money out of the contents.

Edit: Also I recall stories of pirates who hacked container companies to actually find where the valuable stuff was. And containers are steel but they aren't designed for any real security.

Isn't that possible now, by spoofing GPS? Would the crew have any idea until they suddenly saw shore?

Ships are trackable by satellite. Photos, I mean; they show up on photos. Totally passive.

So if you have successfully hijacked a Pacific container ship full of automobiles bound for Los Angeles... where are you going to dock it? Who does the offloading? And where do you sell 5500 sedans at once that makes all this risk worthwhile?

I think that planting remotely controlled explosives and extorting payment against sinking the cargo is the way to go.

Sure. As long as you don't care about actually living to spend anything. It's all insured. I'm sure you'll make a memorable example for the next guys with a similar idea.

It is suprisingly easy to lose track of things in the ocean. Even big things. Ships. Aircraft.

If the transponders are headed to X whilst the ship is headed to Y, it may take you a while before you realise that the ship isn't also headed to X. At which point you now have the problem of determinging which of those fuzzy, cloud-obscured smudges is your ship, and which is someone else's.

Radar can pick up ships, but it also detects, say, rogue shipping containers, of which there are a suprisingly large number.

Existing tracking systems rely on AIS transponders:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28372461

Yes, Google can track ships at sea. But it's also relying on AIS, rather than imagery:

http://breakingdefense.com/2012/05/google-satellites-can-tra...

LA-bound cars might be hard. A shipment bound for the Philippines, or India, or elswhere along the Indian or South China seas, quite possibly much easier.

Hacking shipping route info, then sending pirate boarding parties would be pretty cyberpunk (and too easy for these drone ships to actually catch on).

Or maybe not. There's also nobody to make hostage or force changing a course.

A fully weaponized autonomous ship would be pretty badass.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/8/11391840/us-navy-autonomou...

Until commandeered electronically within your harbour.

But what if we just reduced the crew to a few security personnel?

Don't want to suggest automated security systems...too terminator for me at this point.

Most pirates aren't actually after cargo I'd assume. They're just taking hostages and ransoming them.

Couldn't they ransom the cargo?

"Pay us bitcoins or we'll detonate the IED we planted in your ship and sink it"

Time to add robotic turrets to the sides of the ship...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com