This sort of stuff does happen. I knew of one company whose insurance limits them to something like 20 containers per vessel. During the Han lunar new year they the would place as many as 35 onto a single ship. One of these would be bound to be on top, especially if you can somehow determine when they entered the loading dock relative to other containers on the vessel. They'd probably get zero coverage once the insurer found out they'd overloaded too.

"Hacking" might not be an appropriate term here though. Most shipping website security is beyond awful. I've used Selenium to pull stuff off of shipping sites before as APIs are almost non-existent. When they do exist, they return fixed length text that you have to decode or you're using something archaic like automated email replies when you email a container number to them. (I have sent thousands of emails in a five minute period to a single VOCC to figure out if they were actually the ones shipping something and where the cargo is.) Lastly I've actually sent emails to website support on tracking sites telling them they weren't sanitizing inputs at all. Zero interest or chest pounding brush off reply.

As for barcodes, they probably mean shipping container number (ISO 6346 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346).

Now all you need are pirates with a Russian Mil Mi-26 to dig for the buried treasure on the vessel while at sea (like in William Gibson's Spook Country)

I'm under the impression that stuff small and valuable like iPhones are transported by plane but that still leaves plenty of targets.

> I'm under the impression that stuff small and valuable like iPhones are transported by plane

That's not how freight works.

FedEx ships Apple handsets to the U.S. mainly using Boeing 777s [1]

Jan 2015 saw 17 billion Air Freight Kilometers available but with utilisation running at about 46% - most routes only have freight used one way [2]

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/11/how-apple-ships-millions...

[2] http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/Documents/economics/freight-ana...

I'm no expert on the subject, but the term 'air freight' does exist, as well as many articles discussing the pros and cons of transporting cargo by air vs by sea. Google it.

Are you sure?

When we ordered an iPad from Apple in 2011, it got handed to one of the big delivery companies (FedEx?) in China, then got put on a plane to the US.

'Freight' generally implies the bulk transportation of large quantities of goods. When you said 'small stuff', I didn't realize you meant small quantities of stuff.

iPhones and iPads aren't really great examples in this space, because they're often sold before they even come off the assembly line. Apple chooses air freight for (many of) its products simply because that's the most efficient way to operate its particular supply chain.

Mea culpa, you're right, they do ship mostly using air freight.