It is always nice when an intern makes good, and that is entirely the case with Drake Martinet (pictured here), who joins All Things Digital–as of yesterday, in fact.

We could not be happier. Plus, we knew he was our kind of geek after he agreed to spend the night in a tent next to Robert Scoble, to cover last year’s Apple iPad release.

That was when Drake was an ATD intern, until he headed to the New York Times this past summer to work on social media efforts in the newsroom.

And that’s one of the many things he will be working on here, making ATD more Facebook-worthy, Twittified and YouTubed within an inch of our lives.

Drake will also be working on upgrading our multimedia efforts–which is to say, figuring out a more sophisticated strategy for us than BoomTown’s Flip video camera assaults, helping mesh up business development efforts with our editorial integrity, analyzing our analytics and even making sure our new interns are up to snuff.

And, for his next trick, he will also be doing posts on interesting early start-ups and emerging ideas, much in the same way he did a bang-up job with a feature called “Almost Famous” when he was an intern.

Whew! Then again, he is young!

Still, Drake has done a lot so far.

After receiving his masters degree from Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism this year, and spending time in the school’s design program (the d.school), Drake moved to Brooklyn to work for the Times.

In addition to his weekly start-up column for ATD, his written, photographic and video work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous Web sites and blogs.

A native of San Diego, Drake first moved to Northern California to attend the University of California at Davis. He has lived in the greater Bay Area for the last eight years, excepting short stays in Louisiana, Washington D.C., New York and Chile.

When not working on a story or doing a little Web development, Drake can be found at his workbench building all manner of things physical and electronic, like the solar-powered Timbuk2 backpack that accompanies him almost everywhere.

He also loves to twist through the Peninsula hills on his classic Triumph motorcycle. (And, now that he is our employee again, perhaps we’ll make him do it with Scoble in tow.)

Drake joins a spate of recent hires at ATD, including: Liz Gannes on social (now appearing here in her new blog, NetworkEffect); Tricia Duryee on e-commerce; Ina Fried on mobile; and, last but not least, Arik Hesseldahl on enterprise.

And, as usual, much more to come….

About 20 states have enacted or proposed measures that deal with teenage sexters. Generally, the legislation is aimed at treating minors in a more lenient fashion than if they were prosecuted under existing child-pornography or child-exploitation laws, which include the possibility of prison time and sex-offender status.

Since May, states including Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana and Illinois have enacted laws that impose relatively modest penalties against minors who sext, while maintaining harsher penalties for adult offenders.

While many of the new rules make sexting punishable by small fines and short stints in a juvenile-detention facility, there is still little agreement on what the appropriate penalty is—or whether prosecutors should be involved at all.

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Google (GOOG), which helped provide maps and people-finder tools after the earthquake in Haiti, has set up a site dedicated to the oil spill that combines data from Louisiana’s government as well as NASA and state non-profit organizations to provide a map of the oil slick and its effects.

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A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today’s election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

‘He smashed it with the cat’s ears,’ said volunteer Jim Govostis.”

–Morning Call, Nov. 7, 2006

Fantastic. Here we are, just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the integrity and accuracy of some of the electronic voting machines that will determine its outcome are in question.

Again.

According to new research from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines used throughout New Jersey and Louisiana, and in a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well, can be hacked in eight minutes to manipulate vote tallies.

From the Princeton report:

The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It’s easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It’s easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic ‘audit trail’ in the computer. Without voter-verified paper ballots, it’s extremely hard to know whether a voting machine (such as the AVC Advantage) is running the right program.”

Damning allegations and ones which Sequoia categorically denied after unsuccessfully attempting to suppress them. According to Sequoia, its voting machines are vulnerable only in a classroom setting. In real-life election scenarios, they’re just fine. “…Simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections–removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs–make the items in their report next to impossible,” Sequoia said in rebuttal to Princeton researchers’ claims. “In fact, many of the scenarios painted by plaintiffs depend on the existence of crooked, malicious, and corrupt pollworkers, while the success of some scenarios depends on both corrupt pollworkers and inattentive voters.”

How reassuring.

Well, at least they’re not switching votes between candidates like some of those touchscreen systems in West Virginia, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Got a “Verifiable Paper Trail” for Those Phantom Voters?
• Premier Continues Proud Tradition of Diebold E-Voting Screw-Ups
• Make the E-voting System’s Password “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″? That’s so Obvious It’s Genius!
• Diebold: A New Beginning (to the First Step in E-Voting Terror)
• AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
• What Did You Expect? They All Run Windows…

[Image Credit: Diebold Variations]

A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today’s election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

‘He smashed it with the cat’s ears,’ said volunteer Jim Govostis.”

–Morning Call, Nov. 7, 2006

Fantastic. Here we are, just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election and the integrity and accuracy of some of the electronic voting machines that will determine its outcome are in question.

Again.

According to new research from the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, the Sequoia AVC Advantage machines used throughout New Jersey and Louisiana, and in a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well, can be hacked in eight minutes to manipulate vote tallies.

From the Princeton report:

The AVC Advantage contains a computer. If someone installs a different computer program for that computer to run, it can deliberately add up the votes wrong. It’s easy to make a computer program that steals votes from one party’s candidates, and gives them to another, while taking care to make the total number of votes come out right. It’s easy to make this program take care to cheat only on election day when hundreds of ballots are cast, and not cheat when the machine is being tested for accuracy. This kind of fraudulent computer program can modify every electronic ‘audit trail’ in the computer. Without voter-verified paper ballots, it’s extremely hard to know whether a voting machine (such as the AVC Advantage) is running the right program.”

Damning allegations and ones which Sequoia categorically denied after unsuccessfully attempting to suppress them. According to Sequoia, its voting machines are vulnerable only in a classroom setting. In real-life election scenarios, they’re just fine. “…Simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections–removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs–make the items in their report next to impossible,” Sequoia said in rebuttal to Princeton researchers’ claims. “In fact, many of the scenarios painted by plaintiffs depend on the existence of crooked, malicious, and corrupt pollworkers, while the success of some scenarios depends on both corrupt pollworkers and inattentive voters.”

How reassuring.

Well, at least they’re not switching votes between candidates like some of those touchscreen systems in West Virginia, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

• Got a “Verifiable Paper Trail” for Those Phantom Voters?
• Premier Continues Proud Tradition of Diebold E-Voting Screw-Ups
• Make the E-voting System’s Password “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″? That’s so Obvious It’s Genius!
• Diebold: A New Beginning (to the First Step in E-Voting Terror)
• AccuVote? Bit of an Oxymoron, Don’t You Think?
• What Did You Expect? They All Run Windows…

[Image Credit: Diebold Variations]

News.com reports today that at least nine states this year have considered enacting “download taxes” on digital goods–and five of those states have adopted them, including Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Utah. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

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