Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port

https://container-news.com/two-containers-with-same-number-detected-in-chittagong-port/

by wolfgang42 • 4 years ago

401 262 4 years ago

container-news.com

anewpersonality• 4 years ago

Why is this a big deal.. a signal of the end of the world perhaps? Or nefarious forces at play?

_3u102• 4 years ago

It’s like having two cars with the same plate

AlexandrB• 4 years ago

Isn't it more like 2 cars with the same VIN? The plate in this analogy would be the seal.

danielodievich• 4 years ago

I 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

jsiaajdsdaa• 4 years ago

oh no! now how will they track us!!

13of40• 4 years ago

Unless that number is the only thing they're using to route the container, it's more like having two guys named "Joe".

Pakdef• 4 years 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-l...).

This is a completely different issue.

jldugger• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

This is horrifying.

Denvercoder93• 4 years ago

Could you explain why?

jw1224• 4 years ago

A real-life UUID collision

iworahipfaangs2• 4 years ago

Why?

akmarinov• 4 years ago

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

intrasight2• 4 years ago

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?

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

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.

xxpor• 4 years ago

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.

Swenrekcah• 4 years ago

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.

Paddywack• 4 years ago

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.

lowercase• 4 years ago

No it's not lmao

curious_cat_163• 4 years ago

What are the odds?

thrill• 4 years ago

100%

onionisafruit• 4 years ago

More like 98%. There’s a chance this article is satire. It certainly reads like satire.

arecurrence• 4 years ago

The 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-sa...

"Five containers of the second batch have numbers akin to another five belonging to the previous batch, according to Borhan."

Pxtl• 4 years ago

Whenever I see somebody detailing the scope of a mistake at their business, I mentality add the words "at least" to any quantities.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

I 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!

WebbWeaver3• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I always wondered if there isn't someone out there making dodgy devices with mac addresses in someone else's range.

dspillett• 4 years ago

Many 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.

linuxlizard3• 4 years ago

Several 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.

renewiltord3• 4 years ago

Sorry 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?

giobox• 4 years ago

Many years ago I worked for a major cellphone service provider in Europe - cellphones with duplicate IMEI numbers were an issue (the IMEI number was meant to be unique per cellular device much like a MAC address). This occasionally prevented an IMEI block on a stolen phone.

gruez2• 4 years ago

IIRC that's what some manufacturers did. However, rather than squatting in someone's existing range, they ended up squatting in unused ranges that were unlikely to be assigned anytime soon (back in those days the assignments were sequential). IEEE ended up cracking down on this by randomizing OUI assignments.

randomfool• 4 years ago

Years ago I bought a bag of Bluetooth 4.1 USB dongles for development only to find every single one of them had the same MAC address. Ugh.

kube-system4• 4 years ago

Well, there’s a ton of people using Xerox’s 00:00:00

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

The 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.

Denvercoder93• 4 years ago

What happens when somebody has more than a million containers? 6 digits doesn't seem enough to guarantee uniqueness.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

You assign a second owner number to the group, probably

addaon• 4 years ago

There'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.

CodeWriter232• 4 years ago

Ahem, 10 million

throw0101a4• 4 years ago

Like IEEE OUIs, one company can have multiple owner prefixes. Maersk has 41:

* https://www.bic-code.org/bic-company-search/?searchterm=MAER...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346

hakfoo• 4 years ago

I always wondered if this was designed to integrate into the existing railway numbering system. In the US, at least, owner identifiers are pretty consistently 4 characters or less, and individual unit numbers are 6 digits or less (i. e. BNSF 123456).

watchdogtimer• 4 years ago

I believe the 4th character of a container ID is always a U, so the container owner is the first 3 characters.

robk• 4 years ago

U is code for freight container so yes :)

webmobdev• 4 years ago

“I have never seen two containers carrying the same number in my 27 years of career in the shipping sector,” pointed out Mohammed Abdullah Jahir, chief operating officer of Saif Maritime Ltd, adding that such an incident cannot be detected unless the boxes arrive at the same port at the same time.

If the port authority conducting the inspection are not diligent, it's easy to miss this.

smm11• 4 years ago

Either this is a legit warp in the space-time continuum, or it simply is what it is.

antonymy• 4 years ago

The 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."

dylan6042• 4 years ago

I'm surprised it was "buried" that deep.

blamazon• 4 years ago

Something like 97% of shipping containers are made in China. This is presumably not lost on regular readers of container-news.com.

ortusdux• 4 years ago

It 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-number...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

mlyle• 4 years ago

Cheap approximation is square root.

woodruffw• 4 years ago

Yep, 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.

gruez2• 4 years ago

Using 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%2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#A_simple_expo...

vecter• 4 years ago

I think you meant to link to 1-(999999/1e6)^(1178 choose 2) [0]

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1-%28999999%2F1000000%2...

kgermino• 4 years ago

It’s worth noting the full number isn’t just the six digits (plus checksum) but the full number including the letters that indicate owner and type, so a single owner wouldn’t give two of their containers the same number.

That said, how many containers is one company likely to own? 1,000,000 is a big number but it seems like some of the big logistics companies could flirt with that. Doors anyone know if they have multiple “owner codes” or an I just way overriding the scale here?

throw0101a4• 4 years ago

Doors anyone know if they have multiple “owner codes” or an I just way overriding the scale here?

Like IEEE OUIs, one company can have multiple owner prefixes. Maersk has 41:

* https://www.bic-code.org/bic-company-search/?searchterm=MAER...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_6346

runnerup• 4 years ago

Maersk has a capacity to ship 4 million containers at once. I suspect you’d generally have 3-4x that many because they spend a lot of time waiting around and also just pile up in Los Angeles because no one needs to ship (as much) stuff back to China.

jhugo• 4 years ago

It's a mistake. They keep track of numbers they've already used, but in this case failed to do so properly.

jfim• 4 years ago

1178. This is actually part of the base stats package in R:

  > qbirthday(prob = 0.5, classes = 1000000, coincident = 2)
  1178

See https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stats/versions/3.6.2...

emmelaich• 4 years ago

Here's the derivation of a formula by Matt Might

https://matt.might.net/articles/counting-hash-collisions/

amenghra• 4 years ago

You can approximate the birthday paradox by taking the square root. So 1mil gives you ~1000. 365 is ~19 (the actual value is 23).

Upvoter33• 4 years ago

The best part for me was discovering that a site called "container news" exists.

m4tthumphrey• 4 years ago

I literally looked at the domain and exclaimed out loud "container news dot com?!?!?!"

WebbWeaver3• 4 years ago

And it has an app!

This website actually has some pretty good news too. Didn't know protests/strikes were still happening around California.

thebradbain• 4 years ago

I 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.ttnews.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.

WebbWeaver3• 4 years ago

I'm trying to build a library of niche news websites. Thanks for these.

what hubs are you interested in?

wishfish• 4 years ago

https://gcaptain.com/

I like GCaptain. It’s shipping news in a nice format. Started reading it during the Suez blockage.

Almost makes me wish I worked in that industry. Logistics, especially when ship borne, is rather interesting.

walrus012• 4 years ago

Reminds 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.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

As 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• 4 years ago

I recall this. I called it Metcalfe's Law.

xsmasher• 4 years ago

I 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.

lazide4• 4 years ago

There 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.

bluehorseray• 4 years ago

Glad to finally see https://container-news.com/ hit the front page on HN

smarx0073• 4 years ago

Wrong containers!

yetanother-1• 4 years ago

Still good lesson learned.

SturgeonsLaw• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

This is kind of what big chunks of the internet were like back in the late 90s, very early 2000s, particularly before smart phones.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Maybe a rare opportunity to plug one of my favorite non-fiction books, The Box, about how shipping containers restructured global trade.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...

ashildr• 4 years ago

Thank you for mentioning this book!

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

And much more than trade. It had effect on road infrastructure, various temporary constructs including school rooms for emergency situations and housing as well.

shreyshnaccount• 4 years ago

surprised but really not to see people so passionate and dedicated to containers. warms my heart, really best thing to ever happen.

kurofune• 4 years ago

A tragic day for all my fellow containerheads.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

Those containers are going to be worth so much on the collector's market though. Like that stamp with the upside down plane on it.

UberFly• 4 years ago

Obviously one of the two containers traveled back in time. Don't let them touch.

undoware• 4 years ago

They are the same container but the entropy is reversed

remflight• 4 years ago

Can someone please explain the significance?

SV_BubbleTime2• 4 years ago

Between 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.

jameshart3• 4 years ago

Imagine 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• 4 years ago

Funnily enough it was probably a crash in some system that generates the numbers, that caused the duplication.

iforgotpassword• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

This would only be discovered if two nics with the same mac addresses arrive in the same shop at the same time.

tonyarkles2• 4 years ago

I'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!

ntac• 4 years ago

In the late 90s I worked for a company that was afraid of the Internet. They had one computer in a common area that had access to the Internet but not the company's internal network for the ~50 engineers to use.

The internal network was coax Ethernet. I was working on a networking project at the time and ran a packet sniffer on the internal network and saw that some MAC addresses could access the outside world.

I'm lazy and I didn't like having to go halfway across the building, sit at a slow ass computer to download a datasheet, copy it to a floppy, then walk halfway across the building back to my cube, and finally copy it to my computer. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So I modified my network driver to use one of the macaddrs that had internet access. When I needed something from the Internet, I'd load my modified driver then unload it when I was done. Much easier.

I thought I was doing it for such short periods of time that nobody works ever notice. Of course I was wrong.

After about a month I got called into the IT manager's office. And of course the the macaddr I picked belonged to the VP of engineering who also was the son of the president.

Fortunately they understood that young engineers are dumb and do dumb things and let me off with a warning.

Pulcinella• 4 years ago

Gives a whole new* meaning to “This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.”

*Well new-ish. The first time I saw that message as a child playing a game on Windows I freaked out and immediately turned off the computer. I was terrified the computer did some illegal math and I was going to be arrested!

protastus• 4 years ago

Like a new (std::nothrow) meaning!

... I'll let myself out.

cultofmetatron• 4 years ago

me too!

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of this part of Wes Borg's "Welcome to the Internet Help Desk" routine:

https://youtu.be/1LLTsSnGWMI?t=240

saary• 4 years ago

Reading your comment. I had "PC LOAD LETTER" jump to mind.

slivanes• 4 years ago

More likely to be undefined, not null.

ineedasername• 4 years ago

Or:

Nearly 150,000 children we're orphaned today when their parents were tragically lost in a catastrophic data importation process. Heartless DBA's were nonchalant as they spoke to the children of their parents being merely "redundant backups".

kaidon• 4 years ago

LOL... my mind went straight to "Two identical UUIDs were generated for containers running in a Kubernetes cluster which powers Chittatong's infrastructure, wiping out everything in the process".

TheCoreh• 4 years ago

They do sometimes :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713480

Aperocky• 4 years ago

Should've just used UUIDs, could probably turned all of Earth into containers and not had a collision.

Joe_Boogz• 4 years ago

Not should’ve, definitely would not have had a collision.

smarx0073• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Generating a waybill raises exception. It is Friday night and everyone else is already at the bar. Drop the unique constraint and call it day.

smarx0073• 4 years ago

Ok 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.

mrandish• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

I’ve seen this type of thing happen a few times. Usually a combination of a human error at the factory plus flaky backend systems that like to do upserts.

hedora• 4 years ago

So, 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• 4 years ago

When 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• 4 years ago

I 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_s2• 4 years ago

yep, not unheard of for cheap unbranded devices to all have the same MAC, unfortunately.

HeyLaughingBoy• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

20-odd years ago, the college I attended (and worked for) was outfitting one of the computer labs with new network cards; migrating from Token Ring to Ethernet as I recall. To do this, 3COM cards had been bought by the boxful.

We replaced all of the cards, and booted the lab. 1 machine got an IP and then it all went to hell. Every single machine showed up with the same MAC. Think we had to rip and replace to fix it.

cardiffspaceman• 4 years ago

I'm having trouble finding a reference just now, but the MAC address for a modem-based link on Windows had "DESK" until it started causing real trouble. And one of those problems was that GUIDs were obtained by using "the MAC address" of the PC as an input to a DEC-Intel-Xerox-Microsoft algorithm. Around the time of this coming to a head, it came up that some manufacturers were out of MAC addresses for whatever reason, and also that some manufacturers were assuming that two random NICs on an Ethernet would not both be one of $MANUFACTURER's cards, so care was not necessary.

hericium• 4 years ago

Worked for a small ISP in early 2000s. Not every new customer had an ethernet card in their PC and we had problems like installation crews calling the office that there is no port to stick the cable in.

The company obtained 300 cheap Intel PRO/100 Fast Ethernet NICs from China. The idea was that the crews would have a bunch of those cards to be able to install them in customers' computers.

Everything was dandy until second installation in the same building. For a little more backstory - it was a kind of shitshow infra with dumb switches and all customers in a building being in the same LAN.

So... the second installation in the same building rendered the former newest customer's link inoperable. Or wouldn't work, then suddenly there was connectivity, then there was no ping to the gateway but some other devices were pingable etc etc. The crew replaced the card with another one (from the same shipping), re-crimped RJ45s on both ends, changed switch port and nothing - same shit with random internet connectivity losses. Weird situation with seemingly no reason for what was happening.

It later turned out that the reason was that all 300 NICs had the same MAC address. All of them.

tzs• 4 years ago

There 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• 4 years ago

well you can’t stop halfway through the story. what was the outcome of the case?

manytree• 4 years ago

Defendents didn’t pay for the cotton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffles_v_Wichelhaus

yashg• 4 years ago

So Peerless wasn't really peerless afterall.

jameshart3• 4 years ago

There'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." ...

mikro2nd• 4 years ago

Naah... it was a peerless-to-peerless network.

tshaddox• 4 years ago

You’d think serious contracts would normally have provisions that would require mentioning expected dates, since late shipments would presumably be a common occurrence you’d want all parties to consider explicitly.

raincom• 4 years ago

Lessons from such cases(or case law) make one specify expected dates.

wahern• 4 years ago

According to A.W. Brian Simpson, "Contracts for Cotton to Arrive: The Case of the Two Ships Peerless", Contracts Stories, p43,

A contract for cotton "to arrive" was a contract for forward delivery, or, as it is sometimes called, a "time contract". One might expect that such a contract would normally specify a time for delivery. For it is the moment when the goods become available in the market that is of paramount importance to the purchaser, particularly if the purchaser wants the goods for use. But the world in which such contracts originated was one in which this was not really possible. Although one could discover, after an interval, when a sailing ship had left or, more approximately, proposed to leave its port of departure, it was very uncertain when, if ever, it would arrive at its destination. Even when it did arrive, there were uncertain delays in finding a berth to unload its cargo. Hence such contracts did not originally specify the time of arrival, much less delivery, even within some fixed period. All they did was to identify which shipment of cotton was being sold; presumably the rationale of this was that the buyer, so long as he knew which shipment was being sold, would be able to form his own estimate of the probable time of arrival. This would not, of course, be a point in time but a period. It is said that originally such contracts were made only when arrival was imminent, the ship typically having been reported off Point Lynas, which is on the north coast of Anglesey, some fifty miles from Liverpool. Presumably there was a signal station there. No doubt also cotton was sometimes sold as the ship lay in the river, waiting to berth. In such cases the date of delivery could be guessed with some precision, though a square-rigged vessel, if it did not employ a steam tug, could take a long and unpredictable time to cover even fifty miles.

The author also provides the broader context, which is that this was likely a form contract in the nascent commodity futures market. Additionally, this occurred during a period of particularly overheated speculation in cotton. In other words, just as is common today, financial speculators were pushing the legal and technological envelope of the instruments available to them. (Futures markets go back much further, but the mid-19th century is in many respects when modern futures markets began to take on their current shape. He cites another source pointing out that in "'in certain offices in Liverpool today the futures department is still called the Arrivals Department.'")

asah2• 4 years ago

(IANAL)

Reading this case, I'm surprised at the outcome. The seller fulfilled on the terms of the contract.

The contract also didn't specify the precise color or weight of the cotton, the exact destination, etc etc etc so the defendant could make similar claims to renege on the contract.

Granted, time is arguably special inasmuch as it allows the seller to construct a scenario for fulfillment, e.g. the seller could've delivered 100 years later on a new boat that happened to be named Peerless. That's clearly not the intent.

In that sense, a contract can be considered void if it doesn't reasonably specify time.

thaumasiotes• 4 years ago

In that sense, a contract can be considered void if it doesn't reasonably specify time.

The judgment states pretty clearly that a contract is void if the two parties, at the time they made the contract, did not agree on what it meant.

the moment it appears that two ships called the “Peerless” were about to sail from Bombay there is a latent ambiguity, and parol evidence may be given for the purpose of shewing that the defendant meant one “Peerless,” and the plaintiff another. That being so, there was no consensus ad idem, and therefore no binding contract.

[The words are from the defendant's lawyer, but the court appears to have agreed immediately.]

So this isn't formally a "win" for the defendant - formally, there never was a contract, and the suit was dismissed for failure to state a claim.

sporkland• 4 years ago

I felt bad for the seller for a while. Then I realized they probably just sold the cotton to someone else, and that fungibility and liquid markets make a lot of this stuff less risky on both sides.

rossmohax2• 4 years ago

If shipping was done under now void contract, will transport company be paid at all?

magicalhippo5• 4 years ago

We encounter this all the time at work. New customer, so new integration. What's your unique shipment reference? This one? Ok fine. Go into production, and after a few months we get missing shipments. Support check, missing shipments have same reference as old shipments. "Oh, yeah we reuse the references after about 90 days... And, no, we don't have any globally unique references."

This is fun when so much of the flow is based on these references, think goods arrival scanning, and sometimes shipping does take a long time so 90 days or whatever is cutting it close.

auggierose• 4 years ago

Why would you ever reuse an identifier like that? Is there some kind of material cost associated with a new identifier?

taneq• 4 years ago

Add shipping container IDs and ship IDs to the list of annoying human-oriented numbers that you can't assume are unique. :P

vba616• 4 years ago

"Oh, yeah we reuse the references after about 90 days... And, no, we don't have any globally unique references."

The minute a simple unique identifier is established for something, someone who is just important enough not to be told "no" screws it up.

A thing that I've seen is that people want things to be grouped together in reporting, so they insist on it having the same identifier as all other things in the same group.

Sooner or later, they ask for a report that distinguishes between them, though.

petesergeant• 4 years ago

Consequently, as there was no consensus ad idem ("meeting of the minds"), the two parties did not agree to the same thing and there was no binding contract ... therefore, the [buyer] did not have to pay.

tillinghast• 4 years ago

Ooof. dockerd is gonna be _pissed_.

vgeek• 4 years ago

Is Frank Sobotka wanted for questioning? Or is Ziggy more likely to blame?

lr• 4 years ago

As Cory Doctorow once said, “It is only a matter of time before a computer kills us.”

mds• 4 years ago

Sounds like the setup for a William Gibson novel.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

And it's on cases like this you discover your (theoretically) unique DB key isn't

upwardbound• 4 years ago

This 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• 4 years ago

Dexter?

vivegi• 4 years ago

Just yesterday I was reading about Time-of-creation/Time-of-use (TOCTOU) race conditions in symlinks (https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/).

The manufacturer's new container-id generation logic probably has/had this category of issue (i.e., TOCTOU).

gurjeet• 4 years ago

While 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

dheera• 4 years ago

Meh? Maybe the customs should stop caring.

namecheapTA• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Playbook on how to handle a uuid collision

aasasd• 4 years ago

Annoyingly, the top image is of some random containers, and not of any of those two. This is just dumb and useless.

swamp_thing• 4 years ago

Haha. 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• 4 years ago

Maybe relevant:

https://youtu.be/BSe9JDVczUc

Containers are at play here.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

Somewhere 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.

rossmohax2• 4 years ago

So 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?

sabas_ge• 4 years ago

The global platform which should solve the issue is opt in for container manufacturers, not mandatory https://www.bic-boxtech.org/

notorandit• 4 years ago

Forma single case spotted out, i wonder how many other cases can be found with a thorough worldwide investigation.

BrandoElFollito• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

But what does this have to do with docker?

;)

Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port

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