Ambient Shipping – a project to allow you to look inside passing cargo ships | Hacker News Reader

Ambient Shipping – a project to allow you to look inside passing cargo ships

github.com

200 pointsdhotson38 comments

Wow... I had no idea this kind of manifest information was publicly available. I'm kind of unreasonably excited by this.

Using the Enigma datadata I was able to figure find at least one major vendor another player in my industry uses. That information isn't publicly disclosed elsewhere. Really interesting stuff.

I seem to recall an article online somewhere about 10-15 years ago that described the process that Apple used when shipping desktop computers. They used some sort of freight forwarding company and were able to mask the owner and contents of the shipping containers to protect against theft as well as speculation by competitors as to the type and number of computers in each container.

yes, I imagine if you are interested in masking this information it's absolutely possible but requires some effort. Still interesting to have this as a tool when investigating companies.

What kind of patterns would be interesting to find out in this dataset? A thought came in to my mind to do some data acrobatics and possibly publish a dashboard based on this data if I can arrange some extra time.. (didnt check any possible terms of use for the data yet)

It would be interesting to be able to pick a company and then track the flow of goods to/from that company.

For example, I was interested in a particular company so I looked them up, found shipments, searched another table for the shipper, and then googled to find out what they make.

But being able to more easily navigate that would be interesting, who else does that supplier ship to? The shipments I saw looked kind of regular, but plotting them on a timeline, with weights, would give me a better understanding of what's happening.

Can I correlate shipment sizes with earnings etc? I think there are lots of interesting things to look for.

You can make a microsite that publishes only ridiculous shipping facts such as (these use actual Enigma data):

"Over 1K+ imports were refused by the FDA in 2013 for containing a 'filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance'"

"Only 23 shipments of McDonalds chicken nuggets came into the US in 2013"

"The #1 piece of cargo imported into the U.S. in 2013: empty containers (over 275k of them)"

Link to actual data: https://public.enigma.com/browse/ams-cargo-descriptions/e36c...

Provides cargo specifications pertaining to each incoming shipment, for 2017, updated weekly. Details include shipment ID's, container numbers and descriptions, and piece counts.

Where exactly can you retrieve the actual bill of lading document in pdf or image format? Enigma's dataset seems to have it all broken down into rows and columns.

What I'm looking for is the actual source documents like this example:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/f2784648ff26fccf187f9371f...

Any idea where Enigma sources from? I want to attain the least latency possible, something like Flexport sources.

This could be used for trading I am sure. Proabably already is. Know a company's expected numbers before they are released by correlating ahipments over time.

Very very cool. I am reminded of the parking lot analysis from satellite photos some traders were doing.

>> I am reminded of the parking lot analysis from satellite photos some traders were doing.

This has been done for years. The smart companies are forging deliveries and movement to manipulate portfolios.

IIRC Bloomberg terminals have pretty extensive information regarding shipping.

Great tool for pirates yeah?

In light of this comment, the sibling comment with the joke link to a space-sim video game cargo scanner seems fitting; pretty sure in-game piracy is the primary use of a cargo scanner in that fictional world, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up the same in the real world.

Always scan the freighter before you and your catalyst buddies suicide gank.

It's main use is the NP-spacecops stopping smuggling. Of course, that doesn't work with a 'scanner' that queries the registered cargo manifiest

I feel like the trick in modern piracy isn't finding a ship, rather knowing how to survive once the US Navy shows up.

So is this tool meant as a road-map to literal pirates, so they can know what to target and when, or is it to let folks know what pirates know, so they can be taken out by the navies of the world?

Seriously - AIS "provides position, speed, heading and other metadata about its movements" and Enigma public gives "what the ship contains".

You could use it as a basis for an AR type 'virtual pirate' game, where you navigate your pirate vessel around the worlds oceans, trying to track and board actual ships. You would get points based on the types of cargo they contain, and success could be determined by statistics on actual piracy, proximity of naval vessels, public information about the owners previous responses to attacks etc. With the money you earn from stealing cargo you can 'buy' a better pirate ship, or 'employ' more virtual pirates to increase success...? Could be a pretty simple Android or iOS app to write?

I have a marinetraffic.com antenna at home, tried it late last night. The data I get seems a bit out of date (July), so as I understand it, it's US-only at the moment.

This would be pretty great as an AR app that queried a live shipping map like marinetraffic.com rather than a local SDR for the AIS info.

I could be wrong but the data on marinetraffic.com only says "tanker" or something of that sort. How does only apply that with this kind of data?

The AIS data is for getting the vessel position and ID / name, the Enigma Public API would still be used to get the cargo details.

Nice idea, but scrapping MarineTraffic.com data is against the terms, according to MarineTraffic.com. They provide a premium API for that. There are very few real-time AIS data sources that are freely available to the public unfortunately.

I believe LinkedIn just lost a case for trying to disallow that. I'm not sure of the morality of it, but it looks like it is legal to do so.

Citation/info: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...

What an ingenius way to combine two seemingly 'harmless' datasets to reveal powerful insights! I'm sure there are many other possible/potential ways to combine publicly available data, hmmm...

Worth noting that (unless I am mistaken, which I may well be) this probably only works in the US, since the AMS is a U.S. Customs system.

I was hoping for screenshots and an app like Flight Radar :-(

Not that I can see any cargo ships from where I am, but it would be cool.

MarineTraffic.com, though without the cargo manifests.

Would be cool to combine with some AR kit - so that it would be possible to look to ships and see it's info in realtime )

Start a startup!

Knew about AIS but not this level of information, SDR has more and more interesting uses every day.

What' SDR?

Software Defined Radio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio)

Readme was a little vague. Found better documentation here: http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Cargo_Scanner

This is a link to a cargo scanner for a video game. The op posted a project that displays the cargo for real ships.

whoosh would probably not be a very constructive statement here, but I think that was an intentional humorous post...

Seemed pretty complete to me. This reads a radio broadcast ships identifier from an attached SDR and looks up the cargo manifest in an API.

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