Casio keyed up after data loss hits customers in 149 countries Japanese electronics giant Casio said miscreants broke into its ClassPad server and stole a database with personal information belonging to customers in 149 countries. ClassPad is Casio's education web app, and in a Wednesday statement on its website, the firm said an intruder breached a ClassPad server and swiped hundreds of …
The data included customers' names, email addresses, country of residence, purchasing info including order details, payment method and license code, and service usage info including log data and nicknames.
Casio has blocked outside access to all databases in the development environment that were targeted by the attackers.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I have three of their G-Shock watches. Each one an example of a triumph of engineering(*). The oldest - 13 years - is still on its original battery. All keeping perfect time of course thanks to the Anthorn transmitter.
I also have two of their calculators dating back to my days at college in the late 80s. Also on their original batteries.
(*)Sadly one is also an example of stupid marketing and design. Red bezel, red strap, red face - that's great. White on black LCD for date etc. - that's stupid. In anything except direct light you can't read the LCDs.
Oh, Casio is still definitely around. But it struck me recently that what they're around *for* nowadays are still almost exactly the same things you associated with their 80s heyday- digital watches, calculators and low-end musical keyboards.
They've done various things over the years (*), but for the most part nowadays seem to have fallen back on their original core successes, even playing off the nostalgia thing to some extent with their watches.
Even the "ClassPad" thing described in the story is apparently related to their calculator line.
(*) They had the Exilim digital compact camera line, but discontinued that a few years back. (Most likely due to the post-smartphone collapse of the standalone digital camera market). Also did PDAs at one point (again, another market that died). And as Sandgrounder notes, they have a line of apparently decent digital pianos I wasn't aware of. (Though that might not be a marketing failure so much as the fact it makes more sense to market niche products in a more focused manner. I should point out that I also have a Casio "home keyboard" from the 90s that's really quite good for what it is.)
Well, there was a related and rather amusing typo on the Telegraph website yesterday… Martin Scorsese’s best films “from Taxi Driver to Casio”.
They corrected it eventually to Casino, but for a while there I did wonder if he’d done a gritty cinema verité documentary about the ‘80s electronics industry, starring Joe Pesci as a small calculator…
The one I've got on my desk is an fx-115. My only gripe was having a dedicated [On] button instead of using [AC] like earlier models. After all it still uses [Shift][AC] for off. I don't know what the other one is as it's buried somewhere. It's so old that it doesn't have a cursor though. Has a white body I think and came with a faux leather pouch. It was still working last Christmas.
Edit: It's a fx-500f.
They did achieve ISO 27001 compliance, albeit it seems a whilte ago.
ISO 27002 - Control 8.31 - Separation of development, test and production environments
g) "not copying sensitive information into the development and testing system environments unless equivalent controls are provided for the development and testing systems."
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