alt.hn

3/20/2026 at 9:04:11 PM

Show HN: Baltic shadow fleet tracker – live AIS, cable proximity alerts

 https://github.com/FormerLab/shadow-fleet-tracker-light

by FormerLabFred

3/20/2026 at 11:05:26 PM

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.

by FormerLabFred

3/21/2026 at 5:28:29 AM

Seems a bit deceptive to say "No cloud, no subscription, runs locally" when it still needs an api.

by dawnerd

3/21/2026 at 5:35:25 AM

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

by FormerLabFred

3/21/2026 at 5:37:45 AM

And the webserver is running locally, this is not web based, that’s the no cloud part

by FormerLabFred

3/21/2026 at 5:06:33 AM

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.

by deepsun

3/21/2026 at 3:06:32 PM

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.

by londons_explore

3/22/2026 at 12:15:24 AM

I was commenting on the link posted.

"Could be" of course many things better. The webmasters could launch their own satellites.

by deepsun

3/21/2026 at 3:48:26 PM

Yes this can be a true intelligence tool, combining many sources

by FormerLabFred

3/20/2026 at 11:33:40 PM

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?

by dark-star

3/20/2026 at 11:38:16 PM

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.

by FormerLabFred

3/20/2026 at 11:41:13 PM

yeah, seemed I had an error in that key, it cut off 2 characters at the end. Works fine now, thanks!

by dark-star

3/21/2026 at 5:30:00 AM

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!

by FormerLabFred

3/21/2026 at 4:21:08 AM

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

by dylan604

3/21/2026 at 9:16:48 AM

:)

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

by FormerLabFred

3/20/2026 at 11:06:53 PM

It would look nice on a Home Assistant dashboard

by Krasnol

3/20/2026 at 11:13:43 PM

Whatever you got :)

Siri, NORA IMO 9259408, give me position, knots, and heading

Later versions

by FormerLabFred