Visualizing Ocean Shipping | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing Ocean Shipping

sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk

29 pointskumarski8 comments

    There aren't many truly seasonal events,
    but a few stand out. There are regular
    summer voyages from Scotland to Hudson's
    Bay, and from Holland up towards Spitsbergen,
    for example: both these appear as huge
    convoys moving in sync. (What were those about?)

The yearly trips from the Netherlands up to the North are most likely whalers going out to hunt and coming back with their catch.

Does anyone have pointers to anything like this, freely available, for modern shipping? (i.e. after GPS and AIS)

This I/O talk may have some pointers:

All the Ships in the World: Visualizing Data with Google Cloud and Maps (https://developers.google.com/live/shows/505972914)

Not quite the same, but you can view the position/heading of some ships here: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/

Yep. Use that a lot as a reference. (AIS transponders send quite a lot information and also a lot of people upload photos of vessels that can be viewed at marinetraffic.com)

There are also a few other projects that have overlapping data. (aprs sites, e.g. aprs.fi - more of an amateur radio thing but will still pick up lots of interesting signals)

(Edit: perhaps more interesting to people around here an usb/serial ais receiver can be had for a few hundred dollars and there is a site called http://www.aishub.net/ where you can get access to the firehose provided you cover your area. Disclaimer: I never tried aishub.)

let's hope pirates don't have computers.

I think the post is more about older ships logs.

For shipping there are rules in place on who are allowed to turn of tracking and under what circumstances.

Also even if "security by obscurity" etc is heavily used it doesn't mean it is a good strategy : )

Ahhh :) I might book that cruise now.

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