16 ms·
Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port
- anewpersonality 4y agoWhy is this a big deal.. a signal of the end of the world perhaps? Or nefarious forces at play?
- _3u10 4y agoIt’s like having two cars with the same plate
- AlexandrB 4y agoIsn't it more like 2 cars with the same VIN? The plate in this analogy would be the seal.
- isatty 4y agoSounds like it, but I’m still interested in finding out how big a deal it is. A quick search shows that there have been cars found with duplicate VINs and making a container with the same serial number seems like pretty pedestrian crime in comparison. That is not to say that this is a crime, could just be plain old manufacturing mistakes and it’s also obvious that not all container management systems check for it (even if it did, unless both end up in the same registry it won’t matter anyway).
- _3u10 4y agoIt’s not a big deal per se but is a sign of a potential big deal. Or a minor f’up
- danielodievich 4y agoI have a custom license plate on my car in my state. A friend of mine told me they saw the same custom license plate on the same vehicle make/model in another state. The only bummer was that that car's color was red, whereas mine is yellow. So two cars with same plate is totally doable if issuing authorities are different. Two cars with same plate from same issuing authority, that's the problem
- kube-system 4y agoThere are special cases where two (or hundreds of!) cars can have the same plate. https://patch.com/img/cdn20/getty/22887410/20200526/033010/styles/patch_image/public/gettyimages-75982563___26152926166.jpg?width=695 https://patch.com/img/cdn20/getty/22887410/20200526/033010/s... https://www.thedrive.com/content/archive-images/ap_111036136231.jpg?quality=60 https://www.thedrive.com/content/archive-images/ap_111036136...
- jsiaajdsdaa 4y agooh no! now how will they track us!!
- 13of40 4y agoUnless that number is the only thing they're using to route the container, it's more like having two guys named "Joe".
- Pakdef 4y ago> _3u10 - It’s like having two cars with the same plate I wish I could have the same plate as everyone else... or no plate at all like Steve Jobs used to do (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-license-plates/story?id=14834608 https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...). This is a completely different issue.
- jldugger 4y agoI imagine it would be a bigger deal if they had the same seal. _That_ would suggest someone was trying to steal cargo, or commit some kind of customs fraud.
- unknownaccount 4y agoThis is horrifying.
- Denvercoder9 4y agoCould you explain why?
- jw1224 4y agoA real-life UUID collision
- AzzieElbab 4y agoNot that terrifying when humans are involved… assuming competence
- dylan604 4y agoAssuming competence with humans involved is terrifying
- iworahipfaangs2 4y agoWhy?
- akmarinov 4y agoIt’s an identifier collision, they’re supposed to be unique. That’s what did SHA-1 in.
- mort96 4y agoSHA-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.
- 4y ago
- curious_cat_163 4y agoWhat are the odds?
- thrill 4y ago100%
- onionisafruit 4y agoMore like 98%. There’s a chance this article is satire. It certainly reads like satire.
- arecurrence 4y agoThe manufacturer reused identifiers (5 to be precise) in a later batch. This was a manufacturing error rather than a freak collision. Edit: Source https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/two-containers-same-number-arrive-ctg-port-3076171 https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/two-containers-sa... "Five containers of the second batch have numbers akin to another five belonging to the previous batch, according to Borhan."
- Pxtl 4y agoWhenever I see somebody detailing the scope of a mistake at their business, I mentality add the words "at least" to any quantities.
- bee_rider 4y agoI add it to the person instead. "Five containers of the second batch have numbers akin to another five belonging to the previous batch, according to Borhan, at least." This is much more reassuring because it just looks like Borhan needs to get his shit together. Optimism!
- WebbWeaver 4y ago>Salam said that it is not possible to identify the number of boxes with double-up numbers without the report from the Chinese manufacturer. Sounds troubling.
- wheybags 4y agoI always wondered if there isn't someone out there making dodgy devices with mac addresses in someone else's range.
- dspillett 4y agoMany years ago I encountered cheap knock-off network cards¹ that had default MACs in the range of a big known name brand, and as far as I know it wasn't some cross-branding/affiliate/other deal. So yes, there has been and no doubt still is. [1] in fact, back in my student days most NICs I had were cheap knock-off versions, the "real" things were not the inexpensive items they are today. This predates it being common to have one built into your motherboard, even more expensive ones, by some time.
- linuxlizard 4y agoSeveral years ago I worked for a company that made a usb+network and usb-only skew of their product. The usb-only boards were the same as the usb+network boards with a few parts not populated. We started getting tech support complaints when we sold the product into China. Turns out, an enterprising vendor bought a single usb+network printer, desoldered the EEPROM (containing the ethernet mac address). Then that vendor bought usb-only (cheaper) products, added the additional parts and bulk copied the single eeprom image (with the mac address) onto the new products, selling them as the more expensive usb+network sku. Result: a dozen+ of our product running on the LAN with the same mac address.
- renewiltord 4y agoSorry to side-track this, but does anyone know if there is a reason why we make homophone spelling errors? Do we sound words out as we write them? Neurologically, what is happening? It doesn't sound automatically the case that the pathways for concept -> word -> write actually flow through a concept -> word -> sound -> write path. It's not a confusion of the word since this user clearly knows SKU is not SKEW. And /u/linuxlizard, if you don't mind saying, were you using speech-to-text to write that comment?
- 4y ago
- banana_giraffe 4y agoThe container in question is SLHU4500470. The first four characters are the owner, the next 6 digits are the unique (per owner) number, and the last digit is a check digit. Somehow I always assumed there'd be more than 6 digit IDs for these things. I'd guess collisions have happened, but never been caught in the same port before.
- Denvercoder9 4y agoWhat happens when somebody has more than a million containers? 6 digits doesn't seem enough to guarantee uniqueness.
- cortesoft 4y agoYou assign a second owner number to the group, probably
- addaon 4y agoThere's only about six million active containers in the world. If one owner has more than a sixth of them, an easy fix would be to issue them a second owner code, basically extending the six-digit field by a bit.
- Denvercoder9 4y ago> There's only about six million active containers in the world. Huh, that's a lot less than I expected there to be.
- contravariant 4y agoThough that's about 1 per 1000 people, and if you imagine how much stuff you'd end up with using all that a container could carry when constantly in use, I guess about a thousandth of that isn't too weird an amount.
- elevaet 4y ago6 million seems like a underestimate. There are meant to be 54k container ships in the world. That would mean an average of 110 containers per ship, and ignores all of the ones in use on land. Some of those ships can carry 24k containers _each_.
- smm11 4y agoEither this is a legit warp in the space-time continuum, or it simply is what it is.
- antonymy 4y agoThe minute I started reading I was waiting for the phrase "made in China" to appear. It's in the 7th paragraph: " M Salam noted that the mistake occurred when containers were made for Sea Lloyd in China."
- ortusdux 4y agoIt sounds like the actual unique number is only 6 digits long and chosen by the manufacturer, so it could either be a mistake or identical randomly generated numbers. My math is a bit rusty - how you you solve the birthday problem for 1mil instead of 365? https://containertech.com/articles/shipping-container-numbers-and-markings-explained https://containertech.com/articles/shipping-container-number... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
- mlyle 4y agoCheap approximation is square root.
- woodruffw 4y agoYep, and it's pretty close in this case: for a 50% chance, a sample of 1178 containers with 6-digit numbers (assuming a uniform distribution) would suffice.
- gruez 4y agoUsing the formula on wikipedia and checking random numbers it looks like the number required for 50% chance of collision is around 1200. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%29%5E%28Binomial%5B50%2C2%5D%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%2... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#A_simple_exponentiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#A_simple_expo...
- vecter 4y agoI think you meant to link to 1-(999999/1e6)^(1178 choose 2) [0] [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%29%5E%28Binomial%5B1178%2C2%5D%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%2...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4y ago
- Upvoter33 4y agoThe best part for me was discovering that a site called "container news" exists.
- m4tthumphrey 4y agoI literally looked at the domain and exclaimed out loud "container news dot com?!?!?!"
- WebbWeaver 4y agoAnd it has an app! This website actually has some pretty good news too. Didn't know protests/strikes were still happening around California.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thebradbain 4y agoI absolutely love industry-specific news sites / communities. Hacker News itself is one (duh), but to me it's most fascinating seeing "non-tech" industries have some sort of digital (or sometimes even a regular print paper, if it's niche enough) presence. Obviously it's not surprising when you think about it that an industry would have its ways to spread news -- but these industries are so out of my orbit that it's always novel to stumble upon. e.g. Freight Trucking is one that has a particularly robust network of competing news sites https://www.freightwaves.com/news/category/trucking https://www.freightwaves.com/news/category/trucking, https://www.ttnews.com/ https://www.ttnews.com/, https://www.thetrucker.com/ https://www.thetrucker.com/ To anyone else who finds this interesting, and I'm not exaggerating, -- if there's any cool industry hubs you find, please send them my way.
- WebbWeaver 4y agoI'm trying to build a library of niche news websites. Thanks for these. what hubs are you interested in?
- walrus01 4y agoReminds me somewhat of getting two pieces of network equipment from a very cheap vendor that have identical Ethernet port MAC addresses. Have seen it more than once.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 4y agoAs I recall, the 3com 3c509 sold so many copies that they recycled MAC addrs and hoped that the old ones wouldn't collide with the new ones. I had a couple hundred go through my hands but never caught a duplicate.
- xbar 4y agoI recall this. I called it Metcalfe's Law.
- xsmasher 4y agoI used to have a list of "bad" IMEI numbers and android IDs; there were some android phones where the whole run of that model would return the same identifiers. If our code found one of those "bad" ids, we'd have to pick a new UUID to use as an identifier for that phone and save it to the flash.
- lazide 4y agoThere is also a brand of Chromebooks that an entire model run had the exact same serial # and machine ID. Same issue. Years ago I made a large scale device data storage system, and one of the key design constraints I included that always threw people for a loop when they saw it was 'device unique IDs are not unique'. The system explicitly scoped all data in such a way that any collisions would always occur within a given customer that owned/controlled the device, to avoid data leakage, security issues, etc. Because yeah, it's amazing the corners people will cut. Last I checked, the system was still working well at 4+ billion devices, so I guess it worked out.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluehorseray 4y agoGlad to finally see https://container-news.com/ https://container-news.com/ hit the front page on HN
- smarx007 4y agoWrong containers!
- yetanother-1 4y agoStill good lesson learned.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y agoThis is legit one of the things I love most about HN, articles might be 80% about tech, but the content in the remaining 20% can be about pretty much anything, and it's always fascinating to get insight into other domains. Never considered that containers were numbered, let alone that a number clash is a significant incident, but thinking about it, yeah it makes sense.
- hadlock 4y agoThis is kind of what big chunks of the internet were like back in the late 90s, very early 2000s, particularly before smart phones.
- Terr_ 4y agoI suspect it's tied up in the shift of quantity/scope of "user generated content". News articles and blog-posts etc. got somewhat pushed out by "look at this cute cat photo I allegedly took myself", etc.
- permo-w 4y agoas HN evidences, this stuff is all still there (possibly more than ever), it's just drowning in an ocean of content aimed at pleasing children, Google's algorithm, and the less intellectually-inclined
- kurofune 4y agoA tragic day for all my fellow containerheads.
- karaterobot 4y agoThose containers are going to be worth so much on the collector's market though. Like that stamp with the upside down plane on it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- UberFly 4y agoObviously one of the two containers traveled back in time. Don't let them touch.
- undoware 4y agoThey are the same container but the entropy is reversed
- remflight 4y agoCan someone please explain the significance?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoBetween oops and sus. In this case, it appears to be a mistake. That a number was accidentally reused. But a concern could also be fraud, theft, smuggling, etc. A “bad” container that was supposed to fly under radar mocked up to look legit if anyone checked.
- jameshart 4y agoImagine if software engineering ID allocation failures made frontpage news in the trade press. "An object reference was discovered to be null today in a web browser window in Frankfurt. Officials said the problem was discovered when some JavaScript application code attempted to read a property from the object reference."
- doctor_eval 4y agoFunnily enough it was probably a crash in some system that generates the numbers, that caused the duplication.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoI just had the very same thought reading the article! "An admin at a local it shop discovered two 3com nics with the same Mac address while setting up a rack of four new servers. The admin got suspicious when reliable network communication was not possible with any of the two servers and after further investigation found the duplicate addresses."
- Aeolun 4y agoThis would only be discovered if two nics with the same mac addresses arrive in the same shop at the same time.
- tonyarkles 4y agoI'm not sure if your quote is from personal experience but... and this is totally cliche from the era... I was setting up a Beowulf Cluster made up of salvage 486s in the early 2000s because why not? We were running into some really bizarre issues, and eventually we got down to the just pinging the machines from each other and started discovering that when we went to ping one of them, we would get two replies! Sure enough, two generic NE2K NICs had duplicated MAC addresses!
- mensetmanusman 4y agoBeowulf Cluster. I just died and woke up in the 90s
- Aperocky 4y agoShould've just used UUIDs, could probably turned all of Earth into containers and not had a collision.
- Joe_Boogz 4y agoNot should’ve, definitely would not have had a collision.
- smarx007 4y agoI understand that ports don’t share container info with each other and manufacturers don’t have a crystal ball to see all container IDs of a given customer but given that first 3 chars identify a shipping company, I have hard time understanding how the shipping company failed to catch this. How did they manage to create two waybills for two containers with the same serial?
- jacobsenscott 4y agoGenerating a waybill raises exception. It is Friday night and everyone else is already at the bar. Drop the unique constraint and call it day.
- smarx007 4y agoOk but still: as a user, how do you even know that there are two containers with the same id? In other words, a human needs to have way of telling them apart. Even if two entries showed up with the same id, I’d assume as a user it’s a glitch and would not put two different shipments into what I would assume is a duplicate entry for the same container.
- biryani_chicken 4y agoI'd assume the containers were labeled at different ports and by chance got sent to the same port. So the persons looking at the containers only had one to worry about. And with both going to the same destination one person probably shrugged when they saw the origin port was somewhere else.
- mrandish 4y agoI don't know anything about shipping containers but I'd assume that the container owning company had the two doppel-containers enter service at different times and/or locations and their asset database either isn't centralized or isn't de-duped.
- zeroimpl 4y ago
- hedora 4y agoSo, if I understand things correctly, the root cause of the global shipping meltdown is that someone used that field as a database primary key?
- lamontcg 4y agoWhen I worked at Amazon we found two NICs with the same MAC address. And that was a long time ago with a comparatively very small server count compared to today. Someone's manufacturing database probably had a tiny race condition.
- halestock 4y agoI used to work for a company that sold labels for various third party printer manufacturers, and let me tell you, some of them were VERY lazy when it came to assigning MAC addresses.
- ghostly_s 4y agoyep, not unheard of for cheap unbranded devices to all have the same MAC, unfortunately.
- toast0 4y agoMACs are supposed to be globally unique, but they only really need to be broadcast domain unique, so you can get away with using the same MAC for a lot of devices as long as most people don't use two on one LAN.
- ghostly_s 4y agoI'm aware; that really doesn't make this excusable practice though.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoI worked for a company that made a networking product and we managed to build 1,000 units with the same MAC address (we had a big block of assigned addresses) because of a miscommunication with the vendor who provided the preprogrammed microcontrollers.. Luckily the MAC was in a rewritable location so it was possible, if a royal pain in the ass, to reprogram them all.
- cricalix 4y ago
- tzs 4y agoThere is a long history of identifiers being reused in world shipping. One of the staples of contracts class in the first year at many law schools is Raffles v Wichelhaus, an English contract case from 1864. There was a contract for someone to sell a bunch of bales of cotton from India to a buyer in England. The contract called for the cotton to be sent on a ship called the Peerless to Liverpool from Bombay. Unknown to both the buyer and the seller there were actually two different ships called Peerless both sailing from Bombay to Liverpool, one arriving in October and one in December. They seller was thinking of the December one when signing the contract, and the buyer was thinking of the October one. The buyer needed the cotton in October and when it did not arrive on the Peerless in October the buyer considered the contract broken and refused to accept the cotton that came on the December Peerless.
- sigstoat 4y agowell you can’t stop halfway through the story. what was the outcome of the case?
- yashg 4y agoSo Peerless wasn't really peerless afterall.
- jameshart 4y agoThere's the beginnings of an Abbott and Costello skit here. "I went to the pier to meet the Peerless but the cotton didn't appear" "Did you talk to Captain Pierre?" "Captain Pierre of the Peerless? No, the captain of the Peerless was Captain Pearce" "Well did you talk to Captain Pearce?" "Yes, on the pier." ...
- tillinghast 4y agoOoof. dockerd is gonna be _pissed_.
- vgeek 4y agoIs Frank Sobotka wanted for questioning? Or is Ziggy more likely to blame?
- lr 4y agoAs Cory Doctorow once said, “It is only a matter of time before a computer kills us.”
- mds 4y agoSounds like the setup for a William Gibson novel.
- raverbashing 4y agoAnd it's on cases like this you discover your (theoretically) unique DB key isn't
- upwardbound 4y agoThis seems indicative of a security concern. When this happens it could indicate someone is trying to get a container full of e.g. explosives or chemical weapons to be shipped to a target city without a paper trail. Imagine if the malicious container had e-ink screens on the outside that allowed the numbers to be changed on the fly to route the container through multiple untraceable steps. :(
- mattanimation 4y agoDexter?
- vivegi 4y agoJust yesterday I was reading about Time-of-creation/Time-of-use (TOCTOU) race conditions in symlinks (https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/ https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/). The manufacturer's new container-id generation logic probably has/had this category of issue (i.e., TOCTOU).
- gurjeet 4y agoWhile TOCTOU is used to describe the problem encountered by software in general, an almost identical problem in lock-free data-structures is called the ABA problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem
- dheera 4y agoMeh? Maybe the customs should stop caring.
- namecheapTA 4y agoI worked at a small "automall" of several dealerships. Our system operated inventory numbers based on the last 6 digits of the vin#. Sounds like with 1 million options, you'd be fine. It didn't take long for duplicates to start coming up when you have hundreds of cars in stock, and sell hundreds a month. Let alone the problem with a car being sold new, and then being traded back in. That was fine, because we had a different leading digit for new vs used. But you'd be surprised how often a used car gets sold, and then traded in again at the same place. Now what number does it get? The same one. Fine, atleast they're not both in stock at the same time. Great. Sell it again. Then when a customer calls six months later, try and lookup the deal your most common way... Oh ya.. now I've got 4 possible deals for this car.
- jarrell_mark 4y agoPlaybook on how to handle a uuid collision
- aasasd 4y agoAnnoyingly, the top image is of some random containers, and not of any of those two. This is just dumb and useless.
- swamp_thing 4y agoHaha. It’s like Hacker news AI that votes things up saw container and port and decided it’s a great devops story from Bangladesh.
- trustingtrust 4y agoMaybe relevant: https://youtu.be/BSe9JDVczUc https://youtu.be/BSe9JDVczUc Containers are at play here.
- Ekaros 4y agoI wonder how common actually duplicated serial numbers are in various things. In some cases they do matter, but in many others not really. Think of the non-smart devices. And it can often be simple human error. Some fat fingers the wrong range in morning, forgets to list the used codes, reads the wrong line, some glitch preventing machine from saving the last used code... Just remember how much stuff is made by cheapest possible bidders, who might not be so much interested to deliver best work always.
- rwky 4y agoSomewhere I worked used the wrong serial numbers of postal delivery. We had an overflow which no one noticed for about a year and we ended up using the same range as another customer of the postal company. There were thousands of parcels with duplicated serials, everything arrived fine and as far as I know there's been no real admin issues either. So in this case it didn't matter.
- rossmohax 4y agoSo a bit of a paint on container is used for routing? How feasible it is for criminals to repaint number on a container enroute to divert it and therefore steal its content?
- notorandit 4y agoForma single case spotted out, i wonder how many other cases can be found with a thorough worldwide investigation.
- sabas_ge 4y agoThe global platform which should solve the issue is opt in for container manufacturers, not mandatory https://www.bic-boxtech.org/ https://www.bic-boxtech.org/
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI do not understand why they are not using solutions to this known problem? If it is just a matter of unique identifier, a UUID4 or similar could be used. I guess that they need some control digits, there are solutions for that too.
- vldr 4y agoBut what does this have to do with docker? ;)