The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a vast, barely explored region outside national boundaries, teeming with undiscovered species and dramatic undersea terrain. A few organizations monitor activity here, mostly international fisheries management groups, but it's easy for a vessel to get lost in the enormous distances. That's exactly what many pirate fishing fleets depend on.
Though normally we associate the term piracy with rogues who commandeer other people's ships, it's also used as shorthand to describe illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing. The Pacific is crawling with fishing pirates. Often their ships are crewed by malnourished slaves who don't see land for months at a time, a practice that has been documented by rights groups and exposed in a 2015 Associated Press investigation. They make their money by fishing illegally or in poorly regulated areas and then offloading their goods to the crews of large refrigerated cargo vessels called reefers in a process called transshipping. The reefer crews mix their legal catch with the pirate catch and then sell it all in port.
[...] Catching the anonymous pirate fishing vessels in uncharted international waters took less than a minute. More precisely, it took a minute of satellite time and three years of complicated signals analysis.
The majority of large vessels on the ocean broadcast their identity and location using the automatic identification system (AIS), which is mostly used to prevent ships from colliding. These days it can also be used to track ship locations, as most AIS data is relayed through satellites. If you want to hide on the sea, the first thing you do is make your vessel "dark" by turning off your AIS broadcasts. What's interesting about pirate fishing vessels, however, is that they need to rendezvous with legitimate reefers if they want to get paid for their catch.
To find the pirates, Amos told Ars, he and Bergman needed to look for odd patterns in the behavior of reefers. The group partnered with Google and Oceana to found Global Fishing Watch, which maps satellite AIS data. After over two years of research, patterns began to emerge. "Often with reefers they come to a halt in the middle of the ocean,"
[...] Certain reefers stood out. They spotted the Panama vessel Hai Feng 648, known to have previously taken illegal transshipments from a Russian pirate fishing ship, lingering oddly off the coasts of Argentina. Meanwhile, the Thai vessel Leelawadee took the same path again and again, traveling between Thailand (already a known source of pirate fleets) and the Dogleg.
[...] Enter DigitalGlobe, a company with five private satellites. DigitalGlobe Senior Director Taner Kodanaz told Ars that his company likes to devote a small part of its satellites' time to causes like SkyTruth's search for pirates. It also happened to have the perfect satellite for the job: WorldView-3, which orbits every 90 minutes, and whose high-resolution cameras can "capture objects that are 1 foot in size."
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:59AM
Financial fraud is the only way to make any money these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:26PM
I actually wonder what the economisch free-market consequences of a total fraudulent market would be. What happens if the production of fraud outperforms the demand? We appear the be living still in a market where demand for fraud outperforms the production. What if in our societies we produce more fraud than there is demand for? Would that deminish the producers of fraud's profits to the point that the market has an ideal amount of fraud? And ideal for whom or what? Would other markets that benefit from the fraud booming florish? And what would the impact of that be on society when the fraud-market is maxed out?
Oh wait. I'm Belgian. Our politicians are already implementing a max-fraud market since many decades. I can just study my own society to get my answers.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:09PM
The book liars and outliers by Bruce Schneider would definitely interest you and anyone intrigued by your comment. I highly recommend it.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:37AM
It's a great book, [schneier.com] but it's not exactly on-topic to my mind: it's about how healthy societies are able to give rise to wide-scale cooperation, so it's not totally irrelevant, but it's not exactly a market-forces book.
(Incidentally, it deserves a far better Wikipedia article.)
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:44PM
But it also clearly mentions that as cooperation in a society increases social controls decrease. Reduced social controls then increase the rewards and therefore rate of defection.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:35AM
I really must give it a re-read.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:00AM
If the govt would just stop regulating fishing then this would all be solved very quickly. You can imagine how great the solution would be. The greatest solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:03AM
Kill all the humans, and let the fish evolve into something more intelligent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:16PM
Yes, the government should stop regulating humaning. Then we can fish for humans without rules. And then conserve the meat in a tin for consumption. Let's do away with all government regulation! What could possibly go wrong?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @04:52PM
I resent you insisting on using tin. What if the market prefers cheap imported lead? Let it decide for itself.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:23PM
Can't waste lead on cans: lead is what water pipes were made of when America Was Great. The less lead pipes, the more America became a Total Disaster.
The solution is obvious!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:24PM
IANAE but unregulated commercial fishing would deplete the worlds fish stocks in short order. Empty oceans, starving world.
But then again that would probably make america great again, so why not. Lets just finish fucking up the planet so we can all go extinct, and we'll be great at it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by andersjm on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:38PM
Try "quoted". Or "copy-pasted". Fnord666 didn't write jack. Annalee Newitz wrote this.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:45PM
You used a spy satellite to discover that? That would make your endeavours a newsitem worthy of submission to soylent. Not so much the discovery. As with this story. But the means.
(Score: 1) by charon on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:20PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:21PM
I prefer to download my illegal fish using a tor network.
- -
The Penguinator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:39PM
Hey, about that 30cm resolution.. i understand that's from a single picture. using interpolation between 2..n frames that ought to yield something far more detailed - given everything we've learned about recovering missing info from fourier-ghosts and other techniques i've read about over the years. so..
can anyone come up with good links to papers talking about the post-processing machinery which is inevitably out there to transform this single frame imagery into what's actually used by people with access?
is 5cm not a more reasonable number?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @06:01PM
on this image one can clearly see marine towing ropes between the ships. diameters for these ropes vary from 20 to 160mm:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Mahachai_1_With_Tow_30cm_WV3_30NOV2016_wm-980x735.jpg [arstechnica.net]
so with a few images and the right software to interpolate and correct for atmosphere these guys can commonly do 5..15mm resolution, e.g. read license plates via these commercial birds. ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:21PM
diffraction limited is diffraction limited. You can improve the resolution to see the diffraction even better. But can't beat it.
You can do things to try and defeat atmospheric turbulence, which helps you get closer to diffraction limit.
Was one of the things we talked about in college optics class...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @10:37PM
Of course there's a diffraction limit, it's why i asked about what's out there with regard to interpolation to gain more detail. if you have two pix you can already build a 3d model. but the more general case is that if you have multiple pix you can probably do with the errors as shown in a paper recently mentioned here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.0076.pdf [arxiv.org] .. you would also get different distortions by taking pix from different perspectives.
is there some current, perhaps 'above college' work on this anyone's aware of?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @03:22PM
Dunno if it helps but I remember this:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~kalyans/research/snapshots/supplementary/results.html [harvard.edu]
And this:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sharppanoramas.pdf [microsoft.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @07:47PM
Which is why I'm quite sure some people alive know where MH 370 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370 [wikipedia.org] ) is:
http://www.heavens-above.com/gtrack.aspx?satid=39232&mjd=56723.7224424663&lat=5.5285&lng=101.9971&loc=Unspecified&alt=276&tz=MALST [heavens-above.com]
http://www.heavens-above.com/gtrack.aspx?satid=39232&mjd=56723.6542702068&lat=5.5285&lng=101.9971&loc=Unspecified&alt=276&tz=MALST [heavens-above.com]
http://www.heavens-above.com/gtrack.aspx?satid=37348&mjd=56723.8418282698&lat=6.2935&lng=103.4583&loc=Unspecified&alt=-57&tz=MALST [heavens-above.com]
See also:
https://www.mindef.gov.sg/imindef/press_room/official_releases/nr/2014/mar/21mar14_nr.html [mindef.gov.sg]
https://www.mindef.gov.sg/imindef/press_room/official_releases/nr/2014/mar/11mar14_nr.html [mindef.gov.sg]
All that going on and no satellites looking at that area?
People may not have known or noticed when it happened, but after they knew it went missing they could work from the last known positions. Hard to believe those spy satellites don't have their cameras on most of the time...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @01:10AM
what's scarier is that these fucks have managed to keep it quiet.