
The invisible language of trains, boats, and planes - williamhpark
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160426-the-invisible-language-of-trains-boats-and-planes
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JoeDaDude
Most of these signals are not so secret, as demonstrated at this DEFCON
presentation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuNOD3XWp4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuNOD3XWp4A)

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dang
We changed the title to what the URL says, which is more neutral.

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gbajson
There is a map to track vessels:
[http://www.marinetraffic.com/](http://www.marinetraffic.com/)

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jdmichal
AIS is generally limited to line of sight, as the signals simply don't carry.
(AIS was designed to be a high-frequency report over relatively short
distances; carrying was never a design goal.) However, there are providers for
ship AIS data which have satellites listening for the radio broadcasts over
open water.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_Syste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System#Satellite-
based_AIS_.28S-AIS.29)

[http://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite-
ais](http://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite-ais)

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ChristinaM
In case people don't know, the reason for this is that AIS uses an already
existing VHF channel (and on recreational craft sometimes even shares the
antenna). AIS is to keep ships from running in to each other. It works great
for that. Even on my 34' sailboat I use different means to keep land-based
people aware of my location when at sea.

It's pretty easy to see a lot of AIS signals near land using
MarineTraffic.com. Since it depends on land-based receivers it's not very up
to date sometimes. It's got me 20 miles away right now since there's no closer
receiver and that's where I was a few days ago. They do have higher level
commercial plans with satellite data access.

What if I need to know about a ship out of line of sight in an emergency at
sea? Then I'd call the USCG and they'd check AMVERS for me:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMVER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMVER)

Given recent issues with piracy, it's not really a good idea to have a big
publicly available database of where relatively slow moving ocean vessels are
at a given time. Even if you had all of the world's AIS signals you'd find
some gaps in certain parts of the world where vessels switch to receive-only
mode.

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dkopi
Was expecting an article about packet transport networks, and signaling
protocols like RSVP or LDP.

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JamilD
You can see crowdsourced ADS-B data at
[https://www.flightradar24.com;](https://www.flightradar24.com;) it's a pretty
cool visualization, and far more accurate than other flight trackers.

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JackFr
Someone's asleep at the switch - from the BBC Stylebook:

"Enormity - Use ‘enormity’ only in its traditional sense of ‘wickedness’ (eg
the enormity of Harold Shipman’s crimes soon became apparent). Do not use
‘enormity’ to mean ‘hugeness’."

