A paper published by academics at Harvard University shows that, using simple and publicly available information, it is possible to track and gather information about Mexico’s 13 drug cartels. They created a tool, MOGO, that scours online information to gather reliable data about the cartels. The paper, “How and where do criminals operate? Using Google to track Mexican drug tracking organizations,” was written by Michele Coscia and Viridiana Rios. … more

A report from Politic365 this week had an interesting interview with Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai. In it he noted that the FCC should revisit how the agency allocates resources to minority and foreign broadcasters:

“It’s time for us to revisit this limitation and make sure that we are giving minority broadcasters and all broadcasters a full range of financial options that enable them to keep their operations afloat and to thrive,” Pai said. He also lauded the Minority Media and Telecommunication Council’s (MMTC) comments regarding how a foreign investor’s capital infusion into local broadcast stations poses no more threat to national security and poses no more risk than a foreign investment in U.S.

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By Silvia Vinas, Global Voices Diverse initiatives have arisen in Mexico that use citizen participation to report on the violence caused by drug trafficking, from the use of tags on Twitter to broadcast acts of violence that are censored by the media, to crowdsourcing initiatives like Hero Reports [es] used to geolocate reports of positive social behavior in the most violent cities in the country. Retio is a free application that uses citizen reports to geolocate “information about shootings, murders and assaults, vandalism, blocked roads, police abuse and all kinds of corruption through Twitter.” Paula Gonzalo explains more about this application in an article from Periodismo Ciudadano [es] (Citizen Journalism).… more

FloatingSheep did an interesting analysis of racist tweets that preceded and followed the presidential election in the U.S. Turns out the tweets were concentrated in the South, especially in Mississippi and Alabama. Check out the map here. The post by FloatingSheep also noted:

• The prevalence of post-election racist tweets is not strictly a southern phenomenon as North Dakota (3.5), Utah (3.5) and Missouri (3) have very high LQs.  Other states such as West Virginia, Oregon and Minnesota don’t score as high but have a relatively higher number of hate tweets than their overall twitter usage would suggest.

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Public Knowledge wrote an interesting post about what the election means for the future of the Internet. Specifically, the post looked at issues likely to come up during the next few years. One important issue is copyright reform, according to the post:

1) there is unlikely to be a bill that strengthens copyright enforcement that moves through either house of Congress without a thorough debate; and 2) there are now more members and Senators looking at the possibility of rolling back some of the relentless march towards stronger and longer copyrights.

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Less than 4% of itemized contributions — those above $200 — to the presidential campaigns came from Latino neighborhoods, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. However, this analysis only included donations of $200 or more, since the campaigns don’t have to disclose identifying information about contributions under that amount. The analysis also barely mentioned that communities of color have higher unemployment rates than whites, and defined “engagement” exclusively as donating money.… more

Somos Primos is a website with more than a decades’ worth of news and resources pertaining to Latino genealogy. The site started out as a quarterly newsletter in 1990, but when that became too unruly, founder Mimi Lozano moved the information online in 2000. Genealogy, knowing where we come from and how we got to be where we are, is pivotal in helping us understand where we’re going, Lozano told me once. In her own life, she said that genealogy played an important role in helping her to better understand her family, and thus herself, and enabled her to pursue a good life for her own family.… more

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica

California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent out notices to 100 mobile apps without a conspicuous privacy policy on their websites to do so or face a fine of $2,500 for every app download. The Los Angeles Times reported:

Harris is looking to close a privacy loophole with the explosion in the use of mobile devices to access the Web. She is extending privacy protections required by state law for personal computers to smartphones and tablets.

This is part of a bigger move on Harris’ part to enforce a California privacy law requiring companies with online services to clearly post privacy policies.… more

Only Texas seniors in the top 7% of their graduating class will be guaranteed admission to the University of Texas at Austin for the summer/fall of 2014, further raising the bar for automatic admission to one of Texas’ top public colleges. Under a change to the statewide top 10% rule, only UT is allowed to limit the number of automatic admissions students to 75% of its incoming freshman class reserved for Texas residents. Since the change took effect in 2011, the percentage of those automatically admitted has been dropping.… more