USS Porter and Oil Tanker collide in Strait of Hormuz (pics)

Modern UAIS systems, designed to help prevent collision at sea, are often turned off in politically "difficult" areas because they transmit the ship's position, velocity (speed and course-over-ground), what they're carrying, and where they're going. Ideal for pirates.

Modern ship radar systems are ARPA's - Automatic Radar Plotting Aids - and they only track vessels if you ask them to, they don't automatically identify and track potential collision threats.

Avoiding collisions comes down to someone actually looking out the window, and someone (possibly, but not necessarily, the same someone) watching the radar for potential threats, and taking the action of deciding to track them.

Really modern radar system, like the ones I've been working on for the past 20 years, aren't cleared to run ships because they haven't been "type certified," which means that they aren't "hardened" and then tested in the active marine environment.

If this happened in an area watched by one of our systems, alarms would have been sounding for around 15 minutes before the actual collision, enough time to take appropriate action.

The problems with getting these "really modern" systems onto ships are multiple. Your coding standards for desktop or web applications just don't apply, you need something more akin to the coding for space travel. There will often be no one on board capable of diagnosing problems, or even identifying if it's misbehaving. As a result it has to work perfectly, all the time, without maintenance, without attention. Such software is expensive, especially since it's safety critical, and subject to SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) regulations.

Net result is it's really, really expensive, and margins in shipping are so tight, no ship owner will install a system when instead, they have to have people on watch who are supposed to accomplish the same tasks.

Added in edit: I see that this, despite having three votes very quickly, is way down on page 3 of the "front page" - so it's been flagged. I'd guess that's because it's from the Daily Mail, and has nothing obviously hacker-related. As a result pretty much no one will see it. <shrug> Still, I hope I've answered your question.