Enlarge / The UV3 Nautilus in early sea trials in 2008. (credit: Frumperino ) Believe it or not, there’s a crowdsourced, open source non-profit attempting to build a sea-launched suborbital rocket. Called Copenhagen Suborbitals, it even had access to a submarine. A club associated with the venture completed the sub in 2008, designed by Peter Madsen, a Danish inventor who is co-founder of the group. That submarine is now at the bottom of the sea, and Madsen is being held by Danish authorities on suspicion of “unlawful killing”—a precursor charge to manslaughter or murder. The UC3 Nautilus was the third and largest submarine effort by the club, costing $200,000 to construct. It served as a workhorse for Copenhagen Suborbitals, helping push the group’s Sputnik rocket launch platform into position on a number of occasions. Nautilus is—or was—powered by two diesel engines above the surface and by batteries underwater. While it could hold a crew of four underwater, all of its controls could be managed by a single person from its control room. By 2011, the sub needed an overhaul. But the repairs required more than Copenhagen Suborbitals could afford to sink into the Nautilus. So in 2013, the group launched an Indiegogo campaign to get it back in the water. In a video, Madsen described the sub and the inspiration behind it. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Biggest amateur-built sub sinks—owner is suspected of killing passenger [Updated]
Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia’s state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device — and it’s not pretty. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2014, the Virginia State Police spent $585, 265 on a specially modified Suburban outfitted with the latest and greatest in cell phone surveillance: the DRT 1183C, affectionately known as the DRTbox. But according to logs uncovered by public records website MuckRock, the pricey ride was only used 12 times — and only worked seven of those times. According to Virginia’s ACLU director, “each of the 12 uses cost almost $50, 000, and only 4 of them resulted in an arrest [raising] a significant question whether the more than half million dollars spent on the device and the vehicle…was a wise investment of public funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Just as your browser’s homepage can be a source of inspiration , so can the new tab page, since you probably open it quite often. How about some fine art throughout your day? Read more… 
If there ever was a strong case for a false advertising lawsuit, it would involve the box art that accompanied the countless video games released in the ’80s. Rarely did the artwork match the visuals in the actual game, but instead of taking companies like Atari to court, artist Dan Polydoris has turned the characters on the boxes into actual action figures. Read more… 
What if you approached your life like a video game, treating your tasks as monsters to be battled and your daily goals as quests? That’s the idea behind HabitRPG , a site and community designed to be a role playing game for your to-do list. Read more… 
Midnight Thunder writes: The first trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens has been released. (YouTube link.) This is the first real opportunity to get a feeling for whether childhood dreams will be crushed or Disney, with the help of JJ Abrams, will be able to breath new life into the story without making it feel like a merchandising excuse. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
New submitter FikseGTS (3604833) writes “A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla’s port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer. The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assigned IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet), 53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens. Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?” Some more details on this front would be appreciated, for anyone who has a Tesla they’d like to explore. Read more of this story at Slashdot.