The thing that should not be forgotten is that this is a test for crewless commercial ships. Considering that most of the profit in modern piracy is from kidnapping, it could get even more interesting in a decade or two as fleet owners jump on this.
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We shall see/
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Something like:
Few of these would make more sense:
Of course it would have to have robots maintaining the UAVs.
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hmmmâŠlets read the few paragraphs that you quoted from the sourceâŠ
looks like the answer is right there if one reads the words. Not remote controllable. Not armed. The âconcerned peopleâ must not be readers. So it seems highly unlikely. Not to mention that they will likely be monitored by satellite 24/7.
The anwser is: NO
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But some are concerned [weasel words] that with no humans at the controlsâŠ
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Iâm sure President Trump will not have these weaponised and let lose along the coast of Mexico to enforce a no-float zone.
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They might have avoided this for PR reasons; but the traditional anti-tamper solution involves a variety of sensors that are tricky to get by without triggering and enough explosives to ruin your day if you do trigger them.
(Since the software and possibly some of the hardware for this is, presumably, something we donât want appearing in a Chinese clone 6 months from now; Iâd assume that there is going to be some sort of intrusion detection. Itâs just not clear whether that means âintruder alert: zeroize key storage!â or something a bit more dramatic.)
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Iâm sure itâs unhackable*
*according to the contractor who sold it
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The U.S. automotive industry has been metric since around 1990, with the exception of the instrumentation (mph vs kmh, etc.) But if you need to wrench on your non-vintage car, all the fasteners are metric.
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Some recent military technology has proven to be completely unhackable.
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While people routinely cross oceans in boats made largely of plastic or wood, itâs hard to make a propulsion system without metal.
(Yes, you can have a sailing vessel with wooden spars, but whatâs going to haul on the lines?).
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âSEA HUNTERâ
Very snappy, indeed.
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I imagine not, as governments (and everyone else who travels by sea or uses things that were shipped by sea) have an interest in people not âsalvagingâ unmanned lightships.
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I would have gone with âShooty in the McBoatyfaceâ.
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To be clear, one tech who wasnât there blamed Windows. And his other claims - like the ship being âdead in the waterâ and having to be towed - were wrong.
Scientific American had a different story: It was the battle management software that was knocked out by a divide-by-zero error, and the result would have been the same regardless of what OS it ran on.
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âShoot McBâ for short.
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Do ceramics count? Depending on what sort of detectors you are trying to evade, they may not be any better than metal; but the fancy ones can replace metals in quite a few areas, if your wallet can stand it.
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Wait a minute, what if this is just an elaborate ruse like âThe Mechanical Turkâ, and there is actually a crew inside sailing it?
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Given the number of years weâve been using various unattended naval infrastructure(undersea telegraph lines are ancient, as are floating navigational markers of various sorts, mines and research drones more recent) Iâd have to imagine that the matter has largely been settled in favor of the âif we meant to have it sitting there and/or wandering around; the fact that it doesnât have a crew is irrelevant.â position.
In general, Iâd imagine that(at least in practice if not in writing) âsalvageâ isnât what it used to be just because communications and tracking are so much better. Like most law, the rules regarding salvage were tacked together to deal with a circumstance that otherwise would have remained ambiguous: âso this ship/wreck/crate just washed up and nobody knows who owns it. What process should we use to avoid having useful stuff rotting in limbo forever without encouraging piracy-in-the-guise-of-salvage?â
Back in the day, when ships didnât have transponders, goods werenât uniquely serialized at the factory, communications were on a âletter sent with next shipâ basis and so on, there was a lot of room for genuinely mysterious stuff, or stuff with no realistic prospect of finding the owner and returning it for a cost low enough to be worth it. Now, there is still room for mystery(especially when a ship is trying to avoid scrutiny, though you may not want the cargo some of those carryâŠ); but a great many formerly mysterious vessels and containers can now likely be tracked down with a few phone calls, which gives the authorities less reason to look charitably on the claim that itâs time for finders keepers.
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The answer to the question in the headline is no, but thatâs because I suspect itâll be hacked well before it gets out to sea.
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