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Coast Guard to Track Ships Using Buoys
nomrniceguy writes "The Coast Guard plans to use dozens of buoys off the U.S. coast to extend the reach of a security system that monitors large vessels heading in and out of ports. The buoys are intended to extend the network's reach -- the Guard now receives the automated data only when a vessel is within about 25 miles of a port. The floating transmitters will relay the information from hundreds of miles off shore, from the middle of Lake Superior and off coastlines from Alaska to Maine."
Good to hear, This may be one use of technology that I am actually happy to hear about.
It doesn't infringe on anyones privacy
It doesn't help fund lawsuits against children
It isn't a shitty use of the DMCA.
Good job U.S.A
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What's the point of this? The folks they're afraid of either won't have the proper tracking equipment or they'll tell the Guard they're hauling bananas.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
The coast guard is in charge of the buoys. They can use them as they see fit.
wdd
...train flocks of seagulls to crap all over the transmitters?
I love michael's idiotic sarcasm.
What exactly is so surprising about this? They're called the US Coast Guard!!! There job is to protect the US coastlines. You should be applauding them for actually doing the job instead of creating more bureaucracy in defending the homeland.
It seems slashdot has turned into some anarchist hangout where you guys wish the authorities have no tools to do their job right.
There's still a large window when tracking 25 miles out, almost an hour. Are they doing this so "terrorists" do not "attack" with large boats? Bad waste of money.
A blog like any other.
I was under the impression that the US had spent billions of dollars seeding the north atlantic ocean with passive buoys and magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) as a net to detect and triangulate soviet subs. This is cold war stuff that could perfectly be reused to counter new threats from terrorism, since it's been there and working for decades and, presumably, still in operation. So why deploy new ones?
The empty one inside your confused head.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Let's just float CowbuoyNeal and see what he detects...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is great. I use buoy data all the time as it provides sea surface temperatures/ dewpoint information and is useful in meteorology.
This information can be found here
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Shipping (especially "supertankers" is a very attractive target for terrorists. The system is largely designed to protect the ships and their ports of call. It is an expensive proposition to install these bouys but it is far cheaper than what we did to protect shipping before. In WWII we used naval escorts to protect civilian shipping as it approached our ports. In today's money this would be prohibitivly expensive.
All it takes is a single terrorist with a small plane or a small boat laden with explosives. The USS Cole disaster would be a minor inconvenience in comparison to the economic and environmental disaster caused by a supertanker being blown apart in or near a U.S. port.
If the attack were cooridinated and a number of US ports were attacked in this manner at the same time, the consiquences to the American economy would be disasterous. It could make the importation of oil grind to a halt for long enough to cause oil prices to sky-rocket and our economy to suffer.
That's great and all but if you bothered to read the post you'd see that the new system extends the current limit from 25 miles not to 25 miles.
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Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com] [primidi.com] . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com [blogads.com] [blogads.com]. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com] [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money.
Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com] [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index [networksolutions.com] [networks
CowbuoyNeal is a float? Somehow I'd always pictured him as a char...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Isn't 100 miles out considered 'international waters' ?
If it is the 100mil mark, that would mean its *none* of their damned business where my boat is..
Why keep up this slow encroachment in the name of 'security' and just tag everyone/everything and get it over with? This is getting out of hand.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They're talking about the nuclear wessels.
You'd probably need a few hundred megatons to displace enough water to cause a nasty tsunami. A normal underwater nuke offshore would be more likely to poison a whole lot of seawater and totally screw up the fishing industry.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
That beyond 11 miles out is international waters, are they allowed to do this? I'm pretty sure it's 11 because that's how the Cruise ship casino's operate, by going into international waters.
Starting in 2000 all vessels over 300 tons were required to upgrade to Digital Selective Calling (DSC) radio equipment. This allows for better distress monitoring among other uses. At the same time all new marine VHF radio designs were required to be DSC enabled. There was a grandfather clause that allowed old designs to be produced until yesterday (Dec 31, 2004).
This means that when you go boating and (god forbid) something happens, very little knowhow is required to start an emergency response You just push a little button on your radio and your GPS coordinates are transmitted to all vessels around you, including the Coast Guard and all vessels over 300 tons.
You do need to register to obtain an MMSI number which will request your boat and personal information. This information is to be used in case of a Search and RESCUE which will hopefully not turn into a Search and RECOVERY. (the basic difference is if you need a medic or a coroner)
Yes there is a system that is similar using Emergency Position Indicating Radiobeacon or EPIRB
The use of weather monitoring buoys as transmition monitors is a logical step to help coordinate rescue efforts. Yes it is also "Big Brother" watching us. This does not mean that it will restrict the rights of how commerce occurs, and may even expedite trade by making customs less intense. The cargo will already be partially identified, so when the government officials show up they know what to expect.
As a final note, private not-for-hire vessels are not required to carry ANY electronic OR electrical devices by any government. Yes, running lights are required on most vessels at night, but oil lamps have worked for centuries.
Just my $.02
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Lets go through the list of disasters we don't have on the east side of the state, nor have any risk of.
Volcano... See #2
I will admit though... we do live in fear of the day or former governor gets behind the wheel again.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
This information is already in the public domain because of a system known as AIS.
AIS consists of radio ID transponders which transmit the ID, status and destination of ocean going vessels.
A Google search will bring up much including sites which display the information graphically live for free.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Oh, Bouy.
Thank you!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if you can do what you want in international waters, why can't they?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Witness the deseased mind of a pedophiliac.
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If there's laws against that, then the sensors in the street that turn the light green for you when there's no cross traffic would be illegal too, dumbass.
Well, going in without a transmitter will get lots of very agitated people going after you. Keep it up and you might get anything from a coastguard boarding party to a friggin' antiship missile. (The US military is infamous for being trigger happy, and I'm sure that the USCG will do us proud in that regard.) In fifty words or less, don't buck the system unless you have a deathwish or enjoy really long prison terms.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
nukes detonated underground or underwater yield disapionting results. The Blast of a nuke isn't generated by converting a mass explosives to a superheated gas like conventional explosives are, but is the result of the surrounding medium absorbing and re-radiating the initial gamma ray burst. Gamma rays have a color-temperature of about 35*10^7 degrees, each re-radiation reduces the color-temperature, the point where the color-temp is down to about 1200 is called the fire-ball.
So while, Water and Earth simply don't have enough gammma tranperency to generate a decent fireball or blast by nuclear standards, you wouldn't want to be next to one either. My guess is to attempt to generate a nuclear tsunami, I'd air-burst about 400M above the water and try for a strike-slip wave tsunami by used the shockwave to depres the water surface rather than going under water and attempting to lift the water.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
True, but 25 years ago you were a primary site for thousands of Soviet war-heads.
--Mike
As far as volcanos go, you don't need to be on the edge of a plate for one to form, just near a thin spot. (Not that you have any in SD, mind you.) Earthquakes don't happen only at the edges of the great big plates, but along cracks between smallish ones as well. Also, quakes can make themselves felt for long distances if they're big enough. The New Madrid Quake was felt in Philidelphia and rang church bells in Boston. Imagine what it must have been like within a hundred miles or so of the epicenter! (To give you an even better idea how big that one was, the ground dropped so far that the Mississippi was running backwards for three days filling it up!)
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Let's not turn this into buoys vs. gulls.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
As far as I remember everything beyond 3 sea-miles form any landmass are international waters. Everybody can move in international waters as one pleases.
You forgot about tornadoes and blizzards. But those can be tracked and you can prepare for them.
Hopefully, I'll be able to get back to SD to see my parents in a week or two. I would love to move back.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
"What happens when our enemies...train flocks of seagulls to crap all over the transmitters?"
I've wondered what happened to that band.
Do you think Tears for Fears or George Michaels could be trained to poop on command as well?
I thought that the coastline from Alaska to Maine was Canadian teritory, or do they mean going the long way around including South America (which would also be outside the US coast guard jurisdiction.)
This is going to make the US safer? How?
Let's think about this for a second.
The US imports a lot of goods, in fact a hell of a lot of goods. Most of these goods come in 40ft containers. These contianers can enter the shipping system at a number of points, very rarely are they opened during transit.
If I was of a certain mind and wanted to detontate my pet nuke how would I get it into position. I would not hijack a ship, to much effort and risk. I would load it into a container and hook up a pocket GPS to the trigger.
I sometimes wonder why we don't do something similar at our land borders? We are protecting our sea borders by detecting all ships. Why not create land buoys to detect illegal crossings.
Not one bit in the article discusses anything about the technical bit. There isn't even a mention of whether or not they would use systems already installed on on all cargo ships above a certain gross tonnage, such as AIS.
Simply using the buoys to extend the coverage of their AIS network would make a lot of sense, since the transmitters are already installed on all relevant vessels and do contain some form of voyage data. Requiring Vessels to retrofit YAMaritime Surveillance Transponder doesn't make any sense.
I gather you didn't bother to read the quote before pasting it in. It starts off with, "To legally enter a U.S. port..." That means that once this is in place, ships without those transmitters won't be allowed to enter U.S. ports. I presume that any ship without the transmitter in working order will be turned away.
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I wouldn't be so confident about earthquakes and volcanos. There's these little pesky things called plumes which happen to turn from time to time into hot points, who push through the Earth crust (see Hawaii (and the African Rift?) for examples). Not that I imply you are going to see one popping up in your neighbourhood in your life.
I wonder if there are enough safe guards to prevent someone from hacking the machine transmitting the ship data or accessing the network through the buoy transmitters. Electronic warfare is going to be a popular hacking sub-genre.
Who extended the marine rights of the US to two hundred miles off-shore for most purposes, including shipping and fishing. It was done in response to other countries who were extending marine boundaries for a variety of reasons.
Besides, it's not like the Navy doesn't know where you are. It's just that their equipment is better hidden. Oh, and as far as "rights" out on the open ocean go you don't have any, as opposed to the captain of an aircraft carrier, who obviously does...
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
I'd say the exploding a nuke over water to create a tsunami would not work. Water, as a liquid, is considered to be incompressible and attempting to create a wave through compression just doesn't seem viable to me.
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Part of the Coast Guard's job is stopping smugglers. Any ship coming in without the transponder is a possible smuggler, and they're going to get stopped. If they don't stop, the Coast Guard is allowed to open fire if needed. That's just doing their job. If you don't like it, try getting their rules of engagement changed. You won't succeed, but have fun trying if you feel that strongly about it.
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Ships without that device won't be allowed in ports, so the first thing terrorists do is to install such a device.
And no, they won't declare their nuke in the freight papers...
The same (non-)effect could be achieved practically for free using satellites, so IMHO this is another case of "Look how we spend your tax dollars to improve our security!".
The paranoia is terrorizing me.
As a sailor I always found this really cool: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ The NOAA has realtime data available from all its weather buoys in the oceans and great lakes; wave height, wind speed and direction, etc.
GHelm: A FOSS vector nautical chart
But Iran's so far away...
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
Once the system has queried an approaching ship, it will either know the identity of the vessel, or the fact that it is attempting to conceal its identity (either by not responding to transponder queries or by spoofing the replies from a ship known to be elsewhere). In the second of these cases, the coast guard can intercept it. This system does not replace satellite coverage, it complements it.
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I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
No one is required to report. But if you expect to enter the US territorial waters, ie, a port to unload your cargo, then you have to report. This report includes destination, ship name and registry, cargo, etc, not all of which is known to Navy surveillance planes.
That's a pretty hard concept to get a pea brain around, especially when it's wrapped in tinfoil.
Infuriate left and right
If I was of a certain mind and wanted to detontate my pet nuke how would I get it into position. I would not hijack a ship, to much effort and risk. I would load it into a container and hook up a pocket GPS to the trigger.
This is something that has concerned me for a while - starting when I was motoring past a port instalation with an enormous stack of COSCO containers during a period when the US and China were rattling sabers a bit.
In case you're not familiar with it, COSCO is the Chinese Overseas Shiping COrporation - which evolved out of the Chinese Red Army.
Even a small container can contain a BIG H-bomb. Most places such containers commonly go - ports, transportaion hubs, railroads, highways, population centers - qualify as targets.
They're big enough to contain a chemical device suitable for taking out a city. Biologicals take even less space, and could disperse an aerosol while in motion.
Or you chould ship whole divisions of soldiers and their equipment in such containers (with the ones containing people disguised as refrigerated food containers to keep them at the edges of stacks for access to air and get them delivered quickly) if you wanted to stage an invasion.
However, I hear that since 9/11 and the antiterrorist reaction, US customs is inspecting and sealing many of the containers at the ports of EMbarcation, and stopping and inspecting container ships about 25 miles offshore, once they're inside the "you can enforce your antismuggling laws" limit. (You can't open the containers on shipboard, of course. But you can detect radiologicals - especially neutron emitters - without unstacking them.)
I don't know how much they're covering. (It IS a government program, after all.) But at least they're aware of the issue and trying to do what they can about it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The US military is infamous for being trigger happy..."
No... The U.S. military is the most famous for being the most maligned by those who would rather appease and surrender. Just because they won't politely step out of the way of those who want to commit mass murder (Bosnia, Africa) like the blue-hats do, doesn't make them trigger happy. It makes them responsible when doing their job.
Nice try at your maligning attempt, though.
The Navy has a complete offshore surveilance system already in place. It is sonar based, but can still monitor incoming traffic by sound and it is highly sophisticated. If ships are to be required to use a transponder, why not make it sonar-based instead of radio?
As it presses down, water is pushed to the sides, it isn't compressed.
The Vatican announced that rumours of misuse of the buoy database is totally without merit...
Oh well, what the hell...
That's North Dakota isn't it?
As soon as he finishes the ski trip.
No more piracy for a while now. No more pirates.
How long until they are replaced by floating indian boys?
You're thinking of North Dakota.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
However shooting on the Coast Guard is an act of war under US law. So, you are free to fire on them, however you have to ask yourself if you like you are armed well enough to take on the US Navy who WILL come after you. I somehow doubt you'd have what it takes to fight off a 688 or 774 attack sub.
but once again, they can(will) retalliate.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it turns out the Soviet targeting wasn't as good as we thought.
Plus, you lay nukes in N.Dakota, I'm thinking S.Dakota won't be so pleasent...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
On a CSI: Miami episode, I saw that they can just pull up a computer screen of all GPS receivers in the area. They found the one receiver that was also transmitting and solved the crime. Wow, isn't network TV educational?
I for one welcome our sonar equipted Buuy masters...
Remind me to invest in Reynolds before you do that..
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
The real question is if he's a real or not.
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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is not cool to call it IFF these days (identification friend or foe) - it's called SSR (secondary surveillance radar) - all aircraft, at and above the 'light' size, have them, as well as ships over a certain size. The only thing different between the military version and the civil version is a couple of pulses (when viewed on an oscilloscope) - it's really very basic. I rarely saw any Australian or NewZealand military aircraft ever use the military modes. More sophisticated technology exists anyway.
SOSUS is still used - but it is definitely not a bloody whapping big 'net' of sensors, just a scattering of them in key areas that triangulate fixes on anything making noise. Same as the HFDF network - used to be called bullseye, name was changed to crosshair, probably something else by now.
Hmmm.
The parent post is insightful! On 9/11, fewer than 4,000 people were killed. The tsunamis that hit this year have killed over 100,000. It shows just how impotent and insignificant the terrorists are.
I, for one, don't want to play into the hands of the terrorists by being afraid. It's asinine that senior citizens crippled from arthritus have to remove their shoes before boarding an airplane. It's disgraceful that U.S. citizens are being subjected to pat-down searches at airports with no probable cause. It's idiotic that we are giving up our essential liberties in the so-called "war on terror." Success to the terrorists wasn't measured in a body count. It's being measured every day in the way that America has become a frightened country.
Those who lost loved ones on 9/11 have my deepest sympathies, but we should not disgrace the memory of those who died by behaving like the terrified, paranoid people that the terrorists sought to make us.
At first glance I read buyos and wondered how that would track ships.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!