Breaking Cyber Waters
You’ve just bought the megayacht of your dreams. One long, lean and fully equipped piece of free aqua gliding artistry, allowing you to lavishly cruise the Côte d’Azur’s golden coast or Island-hop the exotic Caribbean. For 75 million USD the least you’d expect is style, security and total privacy. But as our Insider discovers, a little known website can rip the latter to shreds faster than you can type World Wide Web.
It’s no wonder that the Internet has vastly changed us. The advent of fast and effective search engines like Google and more recently the video streaming sensation YouTube - which stunningly sold for 1.65 billion USD to the former – has revolutionized the way we think and live. And this is why it should come to no surprise that somewhere in cyberspace a yacht-tracking seemingly innocuous website roams its murky waters.
Bearing the uninspired name Automatic Identification System Alive is misleading; this is a highly intelligent tool that is more useful than it first lets on. Just punch in HYPERLINK "http://www.aislive.com" www.aislive.com and you’ll be able to locate any private vessel at any time. How this works is based on the premise that AIS (not the site) is an automatic radio channel communication system (which is fast making the good old radar obsolete) shares information among vessels allowing all ships and boats in a given area to know the position of every other vessel in the vicinity. If that isn’t enough, through this system, vessels can also display their names, courses, speeds, destination, type, cargo on board… you get the idea.
The information for each vessel can then be displayed on an electronic chart plotter or a radar screen, or on an electronic chart running on a laptop. Such a system, once fully integrated, will finally allay the most common fear of the recreational sailor, who gasping with terror at the sight of a bigger fish so to speak, mumbles, “has that large fast moving ship seen me?” On a more positive note, AIS also gives Coast Guards highly accurate and crucial information 24 hours a day, seven days a week regardless of sublime sunshine or torrential rain. Security is primordial these days, certainly.
Now because every ship has an AIS beacon - a series of numbers and letters discreetly festooned on yacht - the whereabouts of any ship can be known at any time. And with a click of a mouse, your privacy vanishes. It’s a case of security and modern technology giving way to the age-old luxury of privacy. Still, it would be nice to know where Saudi tycoon Nasser al-Rachid’s stunning yacht ‘Lady Moura’ is now gliding or docking…wouldn’t it?
