Publisher's Notebook

A Fairfax judge has been found guilty of one of the most elementary computer security blunders. Read on.

Fairfax lawyer Sharon Nelson reports on her blog, Ride the Lightning, that she and her partner and husband, John Simek, were in one of the courtrooms at the Fairfax courthouse the other night giving a CLE session.

Simek was helping someone with a technology question, then he walked up to the bench. On the bench was the judge’s computer. And there it was: Attached to the judge’s monitor, for all to see, was a sticky note. With the judge’s user name. And the judge’s password.

Nelson’s response: “C’mon guys!” There is no rule of information security so fundamental, she said. You just don’t put a sticky note “with the keys to the castle” on your monitor, under your keyboard or in an easily accessible drawer, she added.

Wonder if the password was “123456.” As we have reported previously, that’s the most commonly used, and therefore most easily cracked, password.

Discretion being the better part of valor, Nelson didn’t name the errant judge or provide his/her courtroom number.

She did ask the rhetorical question, “Maybe we need to have a data security CLE for the judges?”

FAIRFAX—Last Friday, 11/11/11, was the day of the 10th annual “Jazz 4 Justice” concert at George Mason University. It also was Veterans Day, which gave this year’s performance its theme.

The GMU Jazz Ensemble played “The Music of World War II,” tunes from an era when bandleaders Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, among others, took the jazz genre to its “high point,” said Jim Carroll, ensemble director. Jazz was at its most popular during the war years.

Carroll told the audience that he really didn’t know how to say thank you enough to veterans, except through the music.

The GMU Jazz Ensemble did all vets in the audience proud – and there were quite a few at the GMU Center for the Arts, judging from the number of people who stood during an “Armed Service Medley” of all the service branch themes.

A trio of students channeled the Andrews Sisters in a rendition of the classic, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Other top tunes of the era included, Carroll said, a “song that needs no introduction,” Miller’s “In the Mood.”

Fairfax lawyer Ed Weiner, the founder of Jazz 4 Justice and past president of the Fairfax Law Foundation, took a turn at conducting the ensemble. The GMU music department honored Weiner with the Director’s Award, thanking him for 10 years of work on the concert, which raises money for the foundation and for the music programs at Mason.

Members of the ensemble bore gifts, too, presenting Weiner with a framed photograph of the group and their leaders in China during their recent visit. Weiner and his wife Maura were able to accompany the GMU students to the Far East.

At the concert, Weiner also announced the results of the Jazz 4 Justice hat contest – an annual exercise to see who can take a hat with the J4J logo the farthest from Fairfax. This year’s winners were Linda and Paul Hammack, who sported their hats in a snap in front of the Sydney Opera House in Australia, some 9,758 miles away.

Here’s to one of the good guys: Ed Weiner.

Weiner was honored by the Fairfax Bar Association luncheon today with the FBA’s James Keith Public Service Award. Among the reasons: As Judge Stan Klein said in presenting the award, “Ed is a tireless fundraiser for the Fairfax Law Foundation.”

Each year, Ed’s law firm, Weiner, Rohrstaff & Spivey, holds the annual Law Day Weiner Roast around Law Day and the Jazz 4 Justice program, a joint effort between the foundation and the music school at George Mason. Klein noted that these programs have raised more than $100,000 for the foundation and more than $25,000 for music scholarships at GMU.

Weiner has been active in numerous other charitable efforts, which help, as the judge noted, “make Fairfax an even better place to live.”

Klein concluded by noting that you can find Weiner at the Union Mill Shopping Center every Saturday this December, “ringing the bell for the Salvation Army.”

Hats off.