NEWS FLASH
Vickie Milazzo Institute Among Top 50 Woman-Owned Businesses
Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD, the pioneer of legal nurse consulting has been named one of the "2004 Top 50 Woman-Owned Businesses" by the Houston Business Journal.
Vickie Milazzo Institute began in 1982 in Vickie's one bedroom condo and is now ranked 14th in privately held 100% woman-owned firms in Houston.
The recognition is enormous in Houston, the 4th largest city in the United States (population 4.8 million) and home to the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world. As a matter of fact, if Houston was a state, it would be the 22nd largest of the 50 United States.
"Women have an edge to becoming entrepreneurs, and women are better at attending to details – looking at the big picture and then taking ideas and implementing them on a daily basis," says Vickie. "Hearing the success stories from my students is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. Entrepreneurship is a constant laboratory where you are learning every day. Here, we get to see the results of the students' own laboratories.
"I am immensely proud of my team. This honor confirms that our passion for what we do and our daily devotion to innovation are rewarded with success," says founder and CEO Vickie.
The Houston Business Journal is owned by American City Business Journals, the nation's largest publisher of metropolitan business newspapers.
Institute Team Rallied Around the Race for the Cure®
Gathering early on the morning of October 2nd, the Institute's staff members and I joined a huge crowd of 33,000 for the 5K Houston Race for the Cure®. It was our privilege to serve as a platinum-level sponsor for this event. We spent an uplifting Saturday morning helping to raise money to support our charity of choice: the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
With your commitment and generosity the Vickie Milazzo Institute and its friends proudly donated $25,610.00 to help eradicate breast cancer as a life-threatening disease and the leading cause of death among women between the ages of 40 and 59. Thank you for your generosity.
Supporting the Cure,
Vickie L. Milazzo, RN, MSN, JD
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Institute supports the cure for breast cancer all year long. Visit the NACLNC® Community's extensive list of recommended authoritative nursing and medical textbooks. All commissions from the sale of books in that section are donated by the Institute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
BEST PRACTICES FOR TECHNOLOGY
Give Away Your Old Computer, Not Your Old Data –
Computer Disposal Tips
by Thomas M. Ziemba, BS, JD
Finally, the day you've been waiting for has come. You've just brought that new bundle of joy into your home – that personal computer you've been coveting has arrived. You've loaded the software, checked your email and you're satisfied that your new machine is working. Now you face the most difficult challenge of all – what do you do with your old computer?
In a simpler time you had several options. Depending on the age of the equipment, you might have given it to your kids or a neighbor or donated it to a school or charity. You could have sold it through a newspaper advertisement. If you weren't overly concerned with the environment, you might have put it out with the trash, tossed it off a bridge into the river (Haven't we all wanted to do that even before replacing the evil machine?) or buried it in your backyard.
Nowadays, you're stuck trying to get rid of a Rambler in a Ferrari world. Churches, schools and most other charities are not looking for older, slower computers. While these organizations may need computers, if your ZapStar 1000 is four years old, it probably isn't a candidate for donation. You probably can't even sell it. As for giving it to your kids, forget that – they're almost certain to want something much faster and flashier for playing games, burning CDs and downloading music. But that doesn't mean you can just toss your old clunker.
Brave New World Makes Your Old Computer a Liability
In today's world, obsolete computers and their hard drives often contain valuable information. If you follow the news, you've seen horror stories about identity thieves retrieving credit card numbers, financial data and social security numbers from old computers. Companies have been held hostage by unscrupulous individuals who "found" their discarded computer data. Other firms have faced fines or stiff penalties for exposing personal data in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. All these true horror stories happened because the companies or individuals improperly disposed of old computers.
When you give away (or toss) an older computer, you give away any information stored there:
Business data including trade and business secrets;
Personal information including email messages, personal files and correspondence;
Financial records including banking and credit card information; and
Internet surfing histories including websites you visited.
More importantly, the entire history of that computer and its use goes with it. You give away not just what's currently stored but anything that's ever been deleted from the computer. Why is all this "past" information still on your computer?
Most people believe that when they hit the "delete" button, whatever they delete disappears forever. Contrary to popular belief, deleting a document doesn't erase it from your hard drive. First, the file is moved to a special folder, usually called "Recycle Bin," "Deleted Items" or simply "Trash." When you empty those "trash" folders, the files appear to be gone. However, Windows and other operating systems simply alter one character in the deleted document's name so the computer doesn't recognize the document as an "active" file. The file itself is still on the hard drive, and it stays there until that portion of the drive is overwritten with new data. Depending on the type and size of file, how full your hard drive is, how much you use your computer and other factors, that record may actually be located in several places on the hard drive, making it hard to completely delete.
The bottom line is this: In most cases, every deleted file or some portion of it still exists, whether it's a letter to an attorney, medical malpractice case report, PowerPoint marketing presentation, scanned copy of a medical record or a particularly nasty email you wrote but never sent. Your personal journal, your financial and banking information, your credit card transactions – anything you've ever saved on your computer goes with your computer when you junk it.
If any of that information fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be catastrophic. Unless you completely destroy the hard drive, it's theoretically possible to recover some data from it. In fact, it's fairly easy for anyone with basic data recovery tools to recover not only "deleted" documents, but also other data from a computer that's not properly "sanitized" before being discarded. So, what steps should you take before disposing of your old computer?
21st Century Strategies Provide the Peace of Mind of Thorough Data Destruction
When you get rid of an old computer, the only way to be sure the data is destroyed is by "scrubbing" or "sanitizing" the hard drive. The Department of Defense, to protect our nation's sensitive secrets, has even established specific levels of cleaning in order to virtually eliminate the possibility of data recovery.
Whatever you do with that old computer, you must first ensure that your confidential information is removed from the hard disk. Even if you're giving your computer to a recycling agency, we recommend that you take the following actions first:
Delete all your documents, mail messages and data files.
Uninstall any programs, applications or other software licensed to you personally.
"Sanitize" the remaining "empty" space on the system's hard drive using readily available software (more on this later).
Unless you're disposing of the computer, give the next owner the necessary disks to re-install the licensed Windows operating system.
As an alternative, you can simply "sanitize" the entire computer and, if necessary, use your "System Restore" disks to either re-install the operating system or return the computer to its original configuration.
If you choose not to do this yourself, there are independent companies that will dispose of your computer, either for free or for a small fee. Before you trust your old computer to one of these businesses, be sure to ask the following questions:
How will they ensure that your hard drive has been scrubbed clean?
How or where will they actually dispose of the computer? They may be shipping it overseas for sale, donating it to a charity, using or selling parts of it, or attempting to recover data themselves as an illegitimate side business.
If you decide the computer disposal company is legitimate, you still can't be sure where your computer is going. It's safer to "wipe" your computer yourself before giving it away.
Scrubbing Software Keeps Your Deleted Data Deleted
Software that does an excellent job of scrubbing your old hard drive is readily available. Some programs can achieve governmental levels of data security. The software works by overwriting the entire hard drive with a series of ones and zeros in a specific pattern. Depending on the level of data destruction you choose, the program makes a series of passes, changing the pattern of ones and zeroes each time. The more passes, the more complete the data destruction. This process of writing and rewriting ensures that all previously stored files are eventually overwritten, down to the smallest portion of data, rendering that data impossible to recover.
Some of these software packages can also be used regularly to "wipe" the free space on a computer that's still in use. This ensures that deleted files truly disappear. While safeguarding the privacy of those files, this process often leaves traces (as evidenced by the patterns used when overwriting). Only the most paranoid will want to use this approach – we recommend wiping your computer only before you get rid of it.
The following computer scrubbing software is cheap and relatively easy to use:
Most of these programs either come as a bootable diskette or require the user to create one. With the computer turned off, you place that diskette in the computer's disk drive, turn the computer on and follow the on-screen instructions to clean the computer. Don't expect this to be a fast process. The larger your computer's hard drive, the longer this will take. Some processes may need to run overnight.
As a savvy CLNC®, when disposing of any computer – your own, your firm's or one from your hospital – you must be sure all data has been destroyed first. These steps may sound inconvenient, but they are essential. The risks of not taking them can be far-reaching.
Thomas M. Ziemba, BS, JD is an attorney specializing in contract development. In addition to Tom's role as general counsel and faculty member for the Vickie Milazzo Institute, he is also the Institute's network administrator.
