Oh, cool. In the midst of an incredibly important election where control of the US House and Senate hang in the balance, a Democrat in the US Senate just had a stroke.

I agree with UKMTO's decision to relax reporting requirements and allow for 3rd party reports of ships being attacks when there is a credible source involved, i.e. the master of a vessel reporting to state that they can see another ship in flames. In this latest report, though, you've got a master calling in to say that they heard a SOS relating to a strike without actually seeing the vessel involved or even identifying it.

https://www.ukmto.org/-/media/ukmto/products/20261101-ukmto_warning_191_26.pdf?rev=d4620238ffd446959c914049b1474287

Apparently a company called Kettletech Labs was testing balloon carried drones this spring. There's video of it.

Separately, a company called Aerobavovna has been selling transparent film balloon systems that are tethered for use as aerostats. Some models have a lifting capacity of 40kg and can stay aloft for 3-4 days. They've got already developed comms platforms for it and it looks similar to what can be seen above the drop-drone in the image I posted the other day.

https://aerobavovna.com/en/home

Pirates have apparently boarded and taken over a large fishing vessel of some sort off the Horn of Africa south of Socotra. Probably Somali activity, rather than Houthis, but who the hell knows these days. Some speculation that they may wish to use the vessel as a carrier for a Pirate Action Group. Yes, it is 2026 and pirates have action groups and motherships.

Been rainy here in Albania and I've been mostly staying in and playing Cyberpunk 2077.

I'm booked for a tour to see Berat and Apollonia on Tuesday, which looks to be the best upcoming day for weather. Still looking for a way to try and see Narta lagoon for some birdwatching and to see the monastery. Basically no public transit. Ancient Byllis seems like it is doable from Vlore, but not seeing any tour options.

There are two darker panels seen above the drone itself and I wonder if these are solar panels to supply power to batteries for onboard navigation, drop mechanisms and communication systems. I'm not sure if these things have any sort of active buoyancy control. Ukraine is known to use mesh networks to extend communications ranges and these balloons have got to be making the majority of their journey pretty high in the sky.

I'm still thinking as I previously did from the wreckage of one seen at a Moscow airport that these might be Corvo "cardboard" drones developed in Australia. The shape and coloration is right.

I've now seen video confirming that Ukraine is using balloons to carry fixed wing drones deep into Russian territory, getting free miles from the wind before dropping short-range drones which would never otherwise have the ability to travel as far as Moscow.

This combined system of balloon + drone probably has a significantly lower cost than a long range drone like a FP-1, which has to carry enough fuel to fly all the way there.

Here is a close crop. Anyone able to ID the drone model?

@Tutanota From a place of caring: please communicate up the chain that an "all hands" meeting needs to be had about whether Tuta is "evaluating embracing AI development" or is fully against AI.

The longer you wait to put out a statement for the latter is time you are losing the trust and $$$ of the refugees fleeing Proton.

I know its scary talking to higher-ups about AI, but they tend to REALLY care about money and stealing market share from competitors (proton).

I first encountered Proton because they were claiming to be a 'secure' email service but didn't really list a threat model and... they're email. There's basically no way of making email secure against a realistic modern threat model. You can do S/MIME or PGP and get end-to-end encryption, but they're so painful to use that the odds are that (unless all of your friends are masochist crypto nerds), no one you correspond with will be using either. I couldn't even get my solicitor to use S/MIME for signing emails to give some integrity guarantees, let alone confidentiality. And, if you do this, email still puts all of the headers in plain text so the provider can see them and has access to the entire shape of the connection graph. So they felt like snake oil and I largely ignored them.

The next time I heard about them was when they funded a far-right YouTuber and endorsed Trump. So they seemed like people who probably weren't to be trusted with any data.

And now they're apparently all in on AI and firing people who say things like 'maybe we should do thirty seconds of security review before we push the output of the bullshit generator to production?'

My surprise level is sitting at approximately 0%.

High octane gas at the gas station near me in Vlore, Albania is currently 225 LEK per liter. If you do the conversion and check exchange rates, I think that is ~$12.50 a gallon.

RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@beardyandrew/117529382477809472

If anyone wanted to honour #PatrickStewart by supporting the organisations he was proud to have worked with, the websites are

https://refuge.org.uk/

and

https://combatstress.org.uk/

Ships transiting Hormuz via the Oman coastline usually have flying bridges high up and have people standing watch with high powered optics. The straight is only some 30 miles wide, but most vessels are transiting via a very narrow corridor. They're passing within miles of each other. A lot of the transits are made at night, in the dark, with running lights and AIS off. A ship getting struck and being set on fire is VERY obvious.

As soon as UKMTO changed its reporting standards to allow 3rd party verified reports, we're now getting detailed reports on basically daily incidents of vessels transiting through Hormuz. This latest one is illustrative.

https://www.ukmto.org/-/media/ukmto/products/20261029-ukmto_warning-187-26-update-001.pdf?rev=c5fca281b8cb48d6b275bf6fb612219f

Here is Sir Patrick Stewart's video, sitting down, writing a check, taking a few cubes of ice out of a bucket and pouring himself a stiff one.

Raising a glass tonight to a real one.

Standing ovation on a life well lived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty6-Ug1wk-0

The thing I remember most about Patrick Stewart, the man, though, is the things he stood for and the way he went about using his celebrity to aid causes. I remember when numerous celebrities were running around dumping ice water over each other and filming it, Stewart recognized that the most important thing he could do is model the behavior the Ice Bucket Challenge was meant to actually be encouraging, getting out one's checkbook and writing a fat check to fund ALS research.

I will remember Patrick Stewart for many things. As an actor, the best night of my week for years was spent watching him on the TV in my basement family room with the rest of my family.

"No matter where you go, there you are."

-Yogi Berra

Today I am eating a pizza and washing it down with a local beer in the old town area of Vlorë, Albania.

Basically, first party reporting has failed and so UKMTO to be of any use at all to other mariners has had to loosen its standards. Frankly, I'm not so sure this scheme is of any use at all, as attacks are so frequent that it is like a weather report stuck on "Stormy with a chance of explosions" all the time. It's meant to be an adaptive tool to tell ship's masters that there is something dangerous going on in a particular area at a particular time, but everyone knows the score and threat level.

Ships masters are being ordered by their parent companies to not report to UKMTO's voluntary reporting scheme when struck by drones. UKMTO appears to have responded to this by allowing third party reports from credible sources (basically the masters of passing vessels). One such report, of a ship on fire in Hormuz off Oman came today.

https://www.ukmto.org/-/media/ukmto/products/20261029-ukmto_warning-185-26.pdf?rev=8e0dc451a8f74c26a4cf1b03e9d73785