What's really horrifying is this: "such an incident cannot be detected unless the boxes arrive at the same port at the same time"

So they running this port with pencil and paper? No database? No sanity checks?

I worked in Bangladesh for 3 years, and it is such a land of contrasts.

The main electricity supply company at the time was running manual billings from a big room filled with manual general ledgers, one “T” account per household.

It is a humbling, impoverished country with its main riches being its resilient, kind, resourceful people.

Down the road/bay from Chittagong are the shipwrecking yards - a big time investment but worth watching is this… https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw

<edit> the film I am looking for is Iron Eaters, a very human view of the horrific shipyards. The above film is from India, but still worth looking at.

Thank you for the link. I just watched it in entirety. It's slow moving but well worth it. It's about a world I did not know existed.

The National Film Board of Canada is one of that country's most culturally valuable assets.

Very watchable indeed. Great stuff!

>So they running this port with pencil and paper? No database? No sanity checks?

Or they simply don't run those queries until they need to. i.e. "we don't give a F unless there's a hiccup"

The point isn't to track containers. The point is to get goods to where they need to be and when. Unless two of the same container shows up thereby causing a WTF moment there is no problem because there is no ambiguity in the container handling process and therefore they don't care.

Or each port does have it's own database, and so they can only notice a collision when two containers with the same ID show up at the same time?

It's not like Bangladesh and Port of Los Angeles have a need/desire/whatever to share the same primary keys in the same database somewhere.

How do you know this container isn't the same one you saw before? You need to have them at the same place at the same time to know they're the same container.

Computers with business logic. It can't be the same one if it travels faster than is possible. And anyway, if they were being tracked ...

Suppose you were the guy who goes around numbering containers to begin with.

What are you going to use, a laptop or something?

If it ran out of power without completing its process, upon reboot it might very well assign the same number to the next container.

Even without a computer, you could have the day shift actually paint the number on the first container, but fail to finish the paperwork or it could get lost.

Then the night shift comes along and uses the same number on the next container.

The terminal doesn't always know the destination. Why would it? And anyway, intended destinations can change.

I don’t see how a database (which they’re probably running anyway) would help, unless it’s connected to all other ports in the world an cross-examined for duplicates.

Which sounds like a lot of work and I’m not sure port operators want to share that, although it would be really cool.

They should use a blockchain!

I’ll see myself out…

It has been proposed in all serious several times - and then immediately the person proposing it was tarred and feathered, then disappeared by the relevant jurisdictions security services (only half kidding). I'd give you their names, but for some reason men wearing sunglasses and sitting in a van appear outside my house every time I consider it.

It’s probably people who think we don’t need gigawatts for a distributed ledger.

While they might consider THAT true, I suspect it has more to do with being able to track which companies and countries are doing what business with whom everywhere - especially if that includes countries they aren't supposed to be.

Tracking containers port to port everywhere would be a MOUNTAIN of useful intel.

Containers are already tracked. There's literally nothing stopping you from saying that container X is going to Italy when, in fact, it's going to Iran. Blockchain isn't magic.

Immutable ledgers only provide value when someone wants to fudge values. A unique constraint in a relational database can identify mistakes just fine.

As long as you trust the owner, administrator and developer of the database. I wouldn't.

Run Postgres yourself. If Postgres developers are going to compromise their own software, it isn’t going to be to mislabel your shipping containers.

Most of the info in databases is boring and nobody cares about maliciously changing it it.

If someone were really interested in changing the number on your shipping container, blockchain can’t prevent someone with a $1 can of spray paint from changing it.

Then others have to trust me.

> spray paint

Sure, but the point here is to not lose the records too, which someone could trivially change if they own the Postgres DB. When I have a shared record of a container and somebody repaints its SN, at least I know I lost it, and I can also easily claim that I did not forge the records too because they signed the record with their wallet.

Instead you trust the developer of the blockchain and of all the apps required to write data to and from it.

Because blockchain. Even though there are now dozens of instances of crypto developers messing up their own work.

Yes indeed, trusting something I can see and compute myself instead of trusting someone's promises. There's no way blockchain will ever be worse than just having to go along with it because there's no way to verify.

> I can see and compute myself

What exactly can you see and compute? The end result in the blockchain is the output of <something>, where <something> is any number of centralized actors putting data from opaque sources based on extremely complex contracts.

No it's not lmao

Could you explain why?

A real-life UUID collision

Not that terrifying when humans are involved… assuming competence

Assuming competence with humans involved is terrifying

Why?

It’s an identifier collision, they’re supposed to be unique. That’s what did SHA-1 in.

SHA-1 is a hash function. What did it in is that there was found a way to make different strings hash to the same value. This is just someone accidentally re-using serial numbers, it's not a weakness in some algorithm.