Show HN: Baltic shadow fleet tracker – live AIS, cable proximity alerts
Comments
FormerLabFred
dawnerd
Seems a bit deceptive to say "No cloud, no subscription, runs locally" when it still needs an api.
FormerLabFred
From head of README
“ Free, open source, runs locally. No cloud, no subscription beyond a free AISStream API key.”
I mean we don’t have the vessels floating around live locally inside machine :) Gotta get the AIS messages from somewhere
FormerLabFred
And the webserver is running locally, this is not web based, that’s the no cloud part
dark-star
Tried it. Doesn't work. Does not show any vessels for me, list (and map) stays empty, console is full of "WS closed: no close frame received or sent. Reconnecting in 10s"
HN hug of death?
FormerLabFred
You got an aisstream.io key and set it before launching? Check the README.You can hard code it in shadow_tracker.py too
Bedtime in Sweden. Back tomorrow if you need support.
dark-star
yeah, seemed I had an error in that key, it cut off 2 characters at the end. Works fine now, thanks!
FormerLabFred
Good!
Tried to do onboarding guide as proper as possible with the scripts and for different OSs. Many OSINT hobbyists/enthusiasts out there, but not all of them are familiar with installing dependencies/launching Python etc
It takes a few 3 min runs to render/populate the map.
Happy tracking!
dylan604
Feels like that could be the point of the site. It's a shadow fleet where the ships are trying to stay hidden from tracking. That would be a great site.
Kind of like my favorite book on my self title "Everything I Know About Women". It's a hard cover book with hundreds of pages. Every one of them is blank.
I guess I find dumb things funny
FormerLabFred
:)
A hybrid war going on in the Baltic region. Women involved too
We have been running the main system a year. Loads of data, less women
Now there is this light version for the hobbyists, onboarding tricky for some users, but README covers it all
deepsun
AIS is the first thing nefarious vessels turn off when they do nefarious things. Or set it to show 100-1000 km off, AIS protocol is easy.
londons_explore
One could combine it with satellite imagery and flag up anything where the ais data and satellite imagery doesn't show a ship in that place.
Ships are big enough that even low Res imagery ought to be able to see them in daylight.
deepsun
I was commenting on the link posted.
"Could be" of course many things better. The webmasters could launch their own satellites.
FormerLabFred
Yes this can be a true intelligence tool, combining many sources
allanrbo
Screenshot or bust
Krasnol
It would look nice on a Home Assistant dashboard
FormerLabFred
Whatever you got :)
Siri, NORA IMO 9259408, give me position, knots, and heading
Later versions
This is a light version of a more heavy-weight ML-based tracker.
README head:
Baltic Sea shadow fleet monitoring via live AIS data. Watches 1200+ vessels from the Ukrainian GUR War&Sanctions catalogue against the AISStream WebSocket feed, plots positions on a self-updating map, flags proximity to undersea cables, and detects Russia↔West transshipment patterns.
Free, open source, runs locally. No cloud, no subscription beyond a free AISStream API key.