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?
So they running this port with pencil and paper? No database? No sanity checks?
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.
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.
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.
What are you going to use, a laptop or something?
If it ran out of power without completing its process, upon reboot it might very well assign the same number to the next container.
Even without a computer, you could have the day shift actually paint the number on the first container, but fail to finish the paperwork or it could get lost.
Then the night shift comes along and uses the same number on the next container.
Which sounds like a lot of work and I’m not sure port operators want to share that, although it would be really cool.
I’ll see myself out…
Tracking containers port to port everywhere would be a MOUNTAIN of useful intel.
Because blockchain. Even though there are now dozens of instances of crypto developers messing up their own work.
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.
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.
> spray paint
Sure, but the point here is to not lose the records too, which someone could trivially change if they own the Postgres DB. When I have a shared record of a container and somebody repaints its SN, at least I know I lost it, and I can also easily claim that I did not forge the records too because they signed the record with their wallet.