First post here. The maritime download thread (Maritime download prototype) is what finally got me to write something, especially the bit about maritime data being a slightly cursed business.
We run a small project that follows sanctioned ships on AIS, and one thing keeps coming up that I suspect this crowd has opinions on: a list can only hold the name a ship had when it was designated, and the ship keeps changing it afterwards. The registry side is closed, as that thread says, but the ship’s own broadcast isn’t, and that’s where we take the name from.
IMO 9296406 is the example I keep going back to. Six authorities designated her between May 2025 and this February, all six call her RIGEL, and none of them publishes an MMSI. What we heard was a Cameroon number broadcasting RIGEL, last on 20 July in the eastern Gulf of Finland. Nine days later a Russian number came up as RUBEZH about 13 km away, and that’s the one that took her down to the Gulf of Suez, where we last heard her on 3 September. She’s been quiet since, thirteen days now, though our coverage down there is thin enough that it’s as likely to be us as her.
So a name-keyed screening run misses her today under any of the six, and the IMO is the only thing that carries across. Our record is at HullCipher . Is that already how people here build the match, or is the name still doing real work?