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Comment by jeremyt | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else read this and think that it might be a good way to do away with piracy also? If there's no steering wheel to grab a hold of, there's no way to steal the ship, and with an absence of hostages, it would be a lot easier to deal with attempted theft, too.

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And, with a ship unattended, there is nobody to impede your progress as you carve through the side of the ship and start offloading prize cargo.

Pirates usually do not have capacity to offload ship - they use small fishing boats and speedboats that won't hold even one container. Cargo in most containers is not very valuable (who need container of t-shirts 600 miles away from closest shore?). Finding container with valuables (IPhones/etc) is difficult as there is no accessible manifest on the ship and opening containers is time-consuming.

I also assume that boat will automatically inform authorities and navy/security will be able to reach ship in a matter of hours. With no hostages on container ship, security can just blow up fishing boat/speed boat pirates used and then wait until they run out of food/water on a container ship. Pirates won't be able to control engine/rudder so there is not much they can do other than to surrender.

You'd trade one risk for another: piracy via boarding by piracy via hacking, as described in the article.

That might be by exploiting vulnerabilities in the communications and navigation systems, or could be as simple as jamming communications and disabling the vessel by other means. Or hacking the upstream waybill system to direct contents to the port or destination of your preference (already a hacking option with containerized freight). Social engineering (password / token disclosure, bribery) is another option.

I didn't, but it could also give way to a new breed of piracy by: - circumventing the auto-pilot's security - boarding the ship and hijacking cargo (no one to stop you)

I'm assuming the ship would be fortified to such a degree that by the time you could "hack" into the steering system or offload any decent amount of cargo, the authorities would have been notified and would be en route.

Not to mention the fact that pirates seem to want to steal the whole ship and appear to be ill-equipped to offload cargo.

Ships already disappear regularly on the high seas.

Some especially attentive news watchers may be aware that a large commercial airliner is though to have been lost without a trace in the recent past.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/08/world/asia/asia-piracy/index.h...

Piloted remotely means there's a way to subvert the remote control. No need to even board the ship until it's safely in harbour.

Of course there's a way to steal the ship. You do it with a keyboard rather than a gun.

Sure, but there are sensors to tell the ship where it is. Give me a GPS jammer and a loop of wire, and I'll drive the ship to my secret treasure island. Of course, there are countermeasures for that, but I think the lack of steering wheel is a particularly weak argument.

Hmm, but also nothing stopping pirates from looting cargo.

Then again, they could just be floating fortresses. Perhaps if it takes long enough to steal cargo aerial support could intervene.

Large container ships actually go too fast for pirates to catch. It is usually smaller ships that are in danger.

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