Video download link | md5sum 6957f7427183bba6699ceab72cb318a0
No Lies Are Acceptable
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Is covering up and lying “a must”? Welcome to the ‘new’ Sirius, where lies become the norm

THE terrible shape that Sirius ‘Open Source’ has found itself in is a downward spiral caused largely by lying management; a bloated company with almost as many “managers” as workers (who actually do the job) is compelling people to not be honest with clients and to make matters worse the CEO starts lying to staff and also about staff. This is the downfall of Sirius; the true story of the company needs to be told and future victims ought to be cautioned upfront.

To be very clear, the company has a history dodging liability and facing litigation. One former employee or a pair of them sued the company. One of them asked me if the company was still “busy”, I can only assume because the two managers (then defendants) claimed to be broke and therefore unable to pay upon losing the case, which was costly (time and money). Generally speaking, here we are again and the company creates more shells, hoping to shuffle people between one shell and the next in order to ‘cancel’ the debt (insolvency) and start afresh. But with what name? And at what point will associates too come to grips with the sort of eel they’re dealing with?

We’ll give more concrete examples next month.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ compared Network Operation Centre (NOC) staff to “monkeys”; the company’s management refuses to talk to staff, resorts to pathological lying, and hopes to somehow maintain the illusion that it is still behaving “professionally”

THE series is getting longer as we go on and on. We’re continuing to accumulate and sometimes receive more explosive revelations, showing that the management of Sirius is not only lying to clients and to staff. It is a lot worse. Sirius makes stuff up. It’s also misrepresenting clients, attributing to them something they never said.

As we shall show next month, the so-called ‘CEO’ (a relatively new arrival) has the audacity to act like a Private Investigator when in fact fabricating and distorting allegations. There may be legal ramifications here, but the company started attacking the staff just two days after it had changed its official registered address to the address of the accountancy, which means it’s hard to serve legal papers to Sirius (i.e. suing the company).

Below we reproduce text from the report sent to the management 4 weeks ago (further context will be provided later as another major scandal unfolds):

Those who accuse Roy, and moreover lump his wife into it (more on that later), conveniently forget all the many positive things Roy wrote about Sirius in Techrights even years before working for the company. This is what’s shown publicly in blog posts, not some assorted chat gossip with a ton of typos.

None of this is about defamation (no falsehoods contained therein), it’s all about ego. It’s about egotistic people, whose names are never even mentioned, not knowing how to cope with constructive and factual criticism. As noted before, the company is deaf to its own staff. Technical people are treated as clueless. This is a recipe for corporate failure.

To be very clear, the company’s clients are never named in relation to the company but in relation to news (they are famous people, public figures). To claims that people with audience of millions cannot be even mentioned in Techrights is outright crazy.

In IRC, the main channel talks about technology, but the company instead cherry-picks some side channel that was deprecated back in 2010. In it, some real issues are discussed, potential misconduct by the company at many levels, even gross misconduct by the company and lies devised to cover up failure to comply with contracts (possible legal breach and actionable). But no person or company gets mentioned, except maybe by accident (very rarely). Roy insists that he did not name people or the companies; the PDFs supplied to Roy support that, as he was always careful. Roy is entitled to an opinion, especially outside work. He used reasonably polite wording.

To be very clear, the job in the overnight Support Team involves about 1 hour of practical work on actual servers (true for NOC colleagues; there’s nothing practical to do aside from response to incidents), the rest of time being devoted to tickets, monitoring, response, and discussion with colleagues. Roy did all of these things very well. Roy never posted to social media while on shift. Ever. That much is very evident.

To be very clear, the company defamed the NOC (Support Team) staff, comparing it to “monkeys” in the official wiki (before hiring those “monkeys”). Staff should not be compared to animals; it’s not fair to animals and it’s not fair to people. This is an example of unprofessional behaviour inside the company. Now the management is running after us “monkeys”. To wit, the company name-called Roy even in company E-mail (calling him “paranoid” in writing and over the telephone). This culture issue isn’t limited to staff. For instance, the company says bad things in Slack, worse than in IRC, and with identifiable names included (e.g. one manager of a client being called “an arse” by the Sirius founder). This is really bad, this is unprofessional, and this gets transmitted to a surveillance company (Salesforce) in another continent, working for clients like ICE. When one’s own chief (and founder) is name-calling the clients by their real name in a privacy-infringing tool, visible to all staff, why are high standards expected from low-paid, exploited, “milked” staff like Roy and Rianne, who already endured unwarranted abuse years prior?

It should be noted that low-quality “gossip” (two-person chat) — with quantity to make up for the low quality — don’t add up to a serious case of disciplinary action, especially against someone who never even spoke in that IRC network, never mind the channel.

Video download link | md5sum 6f9d4e69047e26d649a3053f33c4e035
Paying the Cost of Bad Management
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ status quo is shaken further by admissions from LastPass itself that it had suffered a major security breach, vindicating me after disputes with deeply misguided management, mesmerised by buzzwords and fashionable hype waves

UNDER the guise of “cost-savings” (which was a lie, no money was saved in the long run) Sirius was outsourcing almost everything, in effect replacing Free/libre software with proprietary software. The surveillance and security aspects are rearing their ugly head again and nobody wants to accept responsibility for it. Instead it’s all cover-up.

The video above covers about half a dozen blog posts — the very latest writings on the matter. We weren’t planning to do this on Christmas Eve, but LastPass intentionally waited until the holidays before delivering the bombshell. It hoped not many people would cover this and, in turn, not many people would become aware.

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2022 09:00:50 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; 
rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Thunderbird/1.0.2 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0
From: Roy Schestowitz
Subject: Handover to Shift 2 (30/08/22)
To: [whole team]

[...]

https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/lastpass-data-breach-source-code-stolen

users need to change all the passwords they have 
there and not keep them there if they value real 
security not paper mills.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ failed to protect its clients. While in Sirius I’ve been warning management about this for 4 years; all I received for these warnings was a bunch of threats against me (for raising and politely bringing up the subject).

TODAY is a holiday here, but the subject cannot be left aside. The saga cannot be paused because the holidays are being exploited by truly nefarious companies for cover-up.

Those who are following Daily Links may have noticed already that there are further admissions of a breach at LastPass; mind the timing… just before the most major holiday, probably by intention (it’s a well-known Public Relations or “disaster mitigation” strategy).

We’ve decided that it would be better not to surrender to such “strategic timing” tricks. The revelations were scheduled to be accompanied by PR, complete with “waffle” and face-saving lies (postponed for months… to be explained much later). Suffice to say, in the case of security breaches, people must be informed as soon as possible so that they can take action. But not so with LastPass! It would not be the first company to do so. They just wish to say they said something (without anyone truly noticing), at least in retrospect. It’s in-hindsight optics.

But this post isn’t primarily about LastPass itself; it is a bigger blunder that a company which calls itself “Open Source” actively outsourced away from Open Source to this highly untrustworthy company. The CEO of “Sirius Open Source” [sic] was even trying to defend all the LastPass lies, just as he doubles down on his own lies routinely. He is a pathological liar, so he can probably relate to those who do the same at LastPass.

What we’re seeing at LastPass is just face-saving admissions to clean their hands and claim they were “transparent” and complied with the law (to avoid fines/penalties). But we might not see much press coverage about this; journalists (what’s left of them) are already on holiday. The editors won’t pick any stories from them, no matter how important or urgent those stories may be. Heck, not many people will read the news, either!

As we shall show, in light of more incidents and few reports (far too few), the time to cover this is tonight, not next month as expected/scheduled.

LastPass has certainly failed, but so did Sirius. Sirius cannot claim to be a passive victim here!!

Sirius was picking on the people who reported that LastPass had suffered a security breach and wanted to do the right thing about it. That’s me. In this particular case it’s not the fault of another company but the fault of Sirius for putting all the passwords “in the cloud” in spite of repeated warnings from its long-serving and loyal staff. Honest staff.

Having cautioned about LastPass, which had already suffered breaches, I was repeatedly threatened in video calls for doing what’s right. Of course those video calls were done using proprietary software — that’s what Sirius was becoming. Of course they said I’d receive a copy of the recording but never received any! At Sirius, the lying and deceit had become routine, they ultimately became the norm. In a company where about half the staff goes by the name “manager” the only way to progress was to participate in the lying.

So what happens now? Well, Sirius could get sued by the clients, not just asked for a refund, for misinforming and neglecting systems, even abusing people who cautioned about this internally. I don’t intend to contact clients personally, but maybe they will realise this regardless (by serendipity). What about ISO? Will it revoke certifications? We’ll cover this in a separate part next month.

Do not expect much press coverage about LastPass, owing partly to timing. From the latest Daily Links:

• LastPass has been breached: What now? | Almost Secure

  If you have a LastPass account you should have received an email updating you on the state of affairs concerning a recent LastPass breach. While this email and the corresponding blog post try to appear transparent, they don’t give you a full picture. In particular, they are rather misleading concerning a very important question: should you change all your passwords now?

• The Problem With Password Managers

  During the recent LastPass breach, it was finally revealed that the password vaults were leaked. The company is still downplaying this, but the time to take action is NOW.

I cautioned about this internally about half a dozen times (the LastPass breaches alone), but nothing was done by any of the managers. So they’re all culpable. They all failed to act. One of them, who lies routinely, said that according to LastPass, LastPass is OK and things are safe. They’re just lying to everyone, like he habitually does. Cover-up basically.

Sirius is a disaster, it is a catastrophe, and it’ll never admit it. So someone needs to say this out loud. They’re probably still covering up for Sirius and its misguided use of LastPass, strictly hiding it from most of the clients (as usual).

My latest warning about LastPass came about 1-2 days before I left the company. I reproduce my full message below, but bear in mind that some of the pertinent details will be shown next month when we’re done with the report and move on to bigger issues:

Hi,

I’ve been receiving some relatively solid and professional legal advice for several weeks already. To put it quite bluntly, the impression legal professionals get is that the company cannot afford lawyers and thus makes wild guesses, based on a gut feeling at best.

In Rianne’s case, the allegations are shockingly weak. This, in turn, makes the trail of correspondence work very strongly in our favour. We’re not impulsive, we just follow the law. We’ve both followed the law all along. We know our rights and we have people to assess the law.

The latest invitation is legally problematic for several distinct reasons. It would not constitute a fair ‘trial’, on a number of different grounds. What you’re trying to apply here is the controversial Reid method, which isn’t just notorious but also unlawful in some jurisdictions. No proper protocols and procedures were followed until (probably due to a lack of legal advice) more recently. In fact, “Investigation Meeting” suddenly and disingenuously became “Disciplinary Hearing”. The process embarked upon did not respect the employee’s right to privacy (setting out the importance of confidentiality) and it seems to be more of a personal vendetta than a real, justifiable case.

Regarding any such hearing, where possible the employer should get somebody who’s not involved in the case to carry out the investigation, for example another manager or someone from HR. HR does not exist in Sirius per se, so the company needs to contract outwards, just like several years ago where HR sided with us, not with the harasser in chief. We never received an apology after that incident. And moreover, I wish to make it known that I am referring to a single example of many such incidents. I can elaborate later.

The sudden and very much unprovoked-for suspension is problematic on a number of legal grounds. There’s consensus among legal professionals (visited or spoke to several) that it was inappropriate and over the top. Perhaps the purpose of it was to obstruct the accused from accessing defensive/supportive evidence. There’s no reason for a suspension of someone who for 12 years never ever did something “dodgy” to company or client assets; quite the contrary. Unless the employer thinks there is a risk that the employee might tamper with evidence or influence witnesses, a suspension is entirely unnecessary. I have no history of tampering with evidence or influencing witnesses. In fact, the “evidence” presented (only a fortnight later!) is actually controlled by me rather than the company. The IRC logs are very informal and have nothing to do with Sirius.

There is also consensus that what’s proposed constitutes a kangaroo court and the reason you don’t want an independent HR agency to handle this (like before) is that the case will be thrown out with prejudice and the company may be held accountable for a lot more than just frivolous accusations and moral damages (twofold).

On deciding whether to suspend an employee, there are also clear legal guidelines. If there’s a serious issue or situation, an employer might consider suspending someone while they investigate. But in this case, the nature of the accusations makes it abundantly frivolous. An employer should consider each situation carefully. Suspension will only be needed in some rather rare situations. This is why, right from the very beginning, the letters and demands sent were legally invalid. If an employer feels they need to suspend someone, it’s important to consider alternative options to suspension and the wellbeing of the person they’re thinking of suspending (unless the intention is to shock and seek reprisal). The employer should think about who will handle matters if further action is needed, but in this case it seems like one or two person control the process from beginning to end. Where possible, a different person should handle each step of the disciplinary procedures: the investigation, the disciplinary hearing and outcome, and the appeal hearing (if an appeal is raised).

It might moreover be useful to document (e.g. write in great length) and to show a clear, systematic pattern; I can prove and neatly present a pattern of evidence which points to the actions by the CEO being vindictive. It would not be unprecedented either. Expect a 50-page report quite soon. A legal team is looking into it.

The process has in general been a travesty and a potential source of disgrace to the company. In this particular case, someone acting as a judge for oneself is not looking good. In principle, recusing oneself is one option, but the process is already tarnished by irregularities that hamper any perception of objectivity and fairness.

This is not a good way to end a relationship with the company. It didn’t have to end like this.

A good company values its workers, listens to workers, instead of treating them like enemies to be deceived and marginalised. Apropos, only minutes ago:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/30/lastpass-goto-breached-customer-information/
If only someone kept warning that LastPass was trouble…

That “someone” was only ever me, raising the alarm like half a dozen times. I still have copies of messages warning against this. Or reporting the incidents spotted in LastPass (at the time LastPass was gaslighting the reporters).

Remember that LastPass wasn’t just adopted to store Sirius account credentials; clients’ credentials (for full access to machines) were outsourced to LastPass, likely without their knowledge. In other words, if LastPass breaches resulted in breaches of customers’ systems, they might not even know it was the fault of Sirius. They might not know passwords of theirs ended up in LastPass.

Here are more recent reports (around the time I left) about the breach:

• Major password manager LastPass suffered a breach – again

  LastPass, a major password manager, says it has suffered its second breach in three months by the same unauthorized party.

• LastPass claims no data was compromised despite cybersecurity attack

  Was the security breach of LastPass limited? In its official statement, the company said that the breach was limited to the development environment and couldn’t reach the customers’ data and encrypted passwords. The company didn’t specify what information was accessed as the investigation is currently ongoing. It further stated that the production environment lies in a different physical environment than the development environment.

• LastPass Password Manager | HACKED!..Again – Invidious

  In this video, we check an article on how the world-leading password manager, LastPass, became the victim of a security breach again. LastPass is owned by GoTo and boasts over 25 million users, and serves around 80,000 businesses worldwide.

The denials from LastPass were basically lies. It doesn’t matter how many facts one presents to Sirius management, it’ll still never admit mistakes and move to something safe, self-hosted, and “Open Source” (like the company’s name). Passwords used to be stored in a wiki (Foswiki) behind a VPN and it was initially self-hosted. Better solutions exist now, e.g. Bitwarden. As this weeks-only coverage from “It’s FOSS” put it, “Bitwarden gets better every day, making things more convenient.”

Sirius could use Bitwarden or many other things.

It’s not about a lack of features; it’s about a lack of real leadership in Sirius. Bitwarden has a lot of good features. To quote the above: “Bitwarden is easily the most popular open-source password manager right now. It is simple to use, cost-effective, conveniently available on mobile/desktop, and secure enough for most common use cases. While it already supported passwordless authentication techniques like fingerprint sign-in, Face ID, PIN, on mobile/desktop, it now has a new addition.”

Sirius also rejected FOSS for communications, despite several members of staff pushing for FOSS and volunteering to install FOSS. Lip service isn’t enough.

To quote the CEO would be worthless (no point pasting E-mail) because he responded with no substance, only a link that parrots lies from LastPass itself.

In spite of this apathy, the subject was again mentioned in handovers and various other means, not just E-mails, only to be dismissed or ignored. If clients lost or lose (or will lose) control of their systems, Sirius is likely to blame. Some crackers out there probably have a list of all the passwords of all the important machines of clients, sometimes even private keys!

This is what happens when companies implement “Mickey Mouse” security and clients trust such “Mickey Mouse” companies to manage their critical systems.

Sirius is of course still not interested in facts or actual news. Expect Sirius management to dismiss the latest revelations as not important and resort to defamatory ad hominem against the messengers, i.e. the usual.

It’s worth noting that, from a purely legal point of view, we didn’t even inform the clients about: 1) the breach; 2) the passwords being there, possibly without their knowledge or consent.

The issues go far further than password management, but LastPass is what’s in the news right now. It’s worth adding that Sirius uses LastPass in ways it ought not be used, e.g. if they are setting up a new client in OTRS they send the password to LastPass (via LastPass to client). “Mickey Mouse” all over this thing!

Some time next month we’ll cover “Communication Tools” at Sirius and how much further the privacy/security failure goes.

Screenshot credits: LastPass Password Vaults Stolen By Hackers-Change Your Master Password Now – Forbes, LastPass users: Your info and password vault data are now in hackers’ hands – Ars Technica, Hackers stole encrypted LastPass password vaults, and we’re just now hearing about it – The Verge

Summary: The self-demolition of Sirius ‘Open Source’ is work in progress; but it’s important to understand how that came about and cautionary notes from within

THE morale inside the company was eroding rapidly and workers became dissatisfied with the transition away from “Open Source”. Some spoke out about it more loudly than others, in spite of the known dangers like incurring management’s wrath. At the moment, there are almost as many “managers” as there are non-managers! Heck, it seems 50% of what’s left in the company right now goes by the name “manager”. What sort of business is this???

The text below shows a culmination of these frustrations coming from yours truly early this year. I was already determined to just leave, but there was still a glimmer of hope things would change.

Well, things did change. But not for the better.

Sirius wasn’t always so toxic a workplace (bullying, abuse, management anger issues et cetera were specified in prior sections). It’s worth noting that what was attractive about this company approximately a decade ago was the colleagues and the company being a way to escape malicious software and instead use decent things. Sadly, that did not last. Well, of course over time (it did not happen overnight!), and especially in recent years, this was no longer the case. And it got worse this past October, as later parts of this series will explain.

The following part of the report was sent to the “company’s founder” before I realised that he probably wasn’t even the company’s founder (he fakes his credentials and [cref 167171 idolises Donald Trump]) but someone who joined it later on. The words from the internal report below hopefully shed light on the atmosphere in early 2022:

The longest-serving staff member sans the company’s founder is paid a salary of 26,500 a year for full time work and there’s a snag, which cannot be conveniently evaded. Roy believes that the company milks him; no pay rise in over a decade (Roy got paid more when he joined), even amid soaring inflation, no apologies, unwarranted bullying, with bullies not being held accountable. Roy did bring up the salary aspect, but this never gets rectified. After almost 12 years… same salary, but again this sort of misses the bigger picture. Roy feels like “low-cost tech labour”, treated poorly and unfairly at times in spite of a lot of factors previously fully conveyed in text (internally). Roy did raise concern — and only internally — more times than he can recall. Anything else is a last recourse in a two-person IRC conversation (no names mentioned). Here is Roy’s message sent to the CEO earlier this year:

Hi ????????,

Last night I tried testing softphone calls with 2 of your phone numbers that I have, I think about 5 times in total, taking timezone into account. I could not test with anyone here as they were asleep. One thing I noticed is that my browser still insists on enabling things manually each time I talk. That’s just how it works.

Yesterday before bedtime I checked my inbox and saw an E-mail with a threatening and combative tone. It was not well received because I hadn’t been approached at all before it was sent. It was sent without even asking me for my side (as if due process does not exist).

I warned in advance about relying on this product, but I received no reply at all. Those softphones typically work only or “best” with Chrome.

This is part of a broader problem and I wish to open a dialogue about a number of other issue. I want to keep this amicable and constructive. Bear with me while I explain.

I don’t think I’ve been demanding or unreasonable. I sacrificed a lot for this role. I’ve accepted a pay decrease for 11 years, even months after I had joined (it did not keep up with inflation and in 2011 when I was moved from weekend slots to weekday+weekend nighttimes — typically a time slot that means 200% the “normal” rate — my pro-rata amount was reduced, even after the increase from 25k to 26.5k). I did not complain. And this E-mail isn’t about money. That’s now what’s important to me.

As I noted in my reply last night, no training given to staff means that mistakes can be made (passing a document isn’t the same as training). Yet worse, from my managers I’m receiving no replies and it often feels like talking to the wall. I don’t know why a manager would think that this management style reinforces confidence from staff. At the start of the year he said we’d start receiving regular updates. This did not happen (no weekly updates as promised) and there has been no effort to stick to the company’s values. In fact, the message is being diluted and my E-mail messages about this remain unanswered. Remember that ???????? and I are your longest-serving (to present) employees. I’m always happy to receive even just a phonecall to touch base.

Then there’s the more ‘petty’ or less important stuff, which I will mention anyway (it’s not the reason for this mail, but I want to get it off my chest). The company was not even sending payslips for years, pension lapses added to a sense of something gone awry silently, recently there was a mistake made by ????????, leaving me working 12 hours in a row (no disciplinary action for her, I assume; that’s just for us, the “low-level” employees to face). I still haven’t forgotten what happened 3 years. There was a climate of threats, directed not only at me but also colleagues; as far as I can gather, there was no accountability for ???????? either, in effect bullying staff, as if some people are exempted from their own standards. And again no transparency; we weren’t even told when she left the company.

We need to look inward instead of resorting to selective finger-pointing at people who work at 1am for roughly minimum wage, even people with a doctoral degree.

If you want to talk about these things, I suggest phone as that would convey and add tone. With text it’s too easy to misunderstand and misinterpret well-meaning people.

The CEO never even responded to this. Did not pick up the phone, either. Roy tried many times. Same outcome.

As noted above, the salary is laughable.

Also, as noted previously, the behaviour of the company in recent years (sometimes lying, choosing unethical clients, rejecting Open Source) is already becoming public reputation damage to Roy and to his work, set aside the company’s concern for its own reputation. Roy believes he could sue particular people inside the company for bullying, but Roy doesn’t want to bother with litigation, seeing that the company is already becoming a liability to his online reputation by its choice of clients and proprietary technologies, which pose moral issues (clerical job, loan shark, military).

Video download link | md5sum 32c3a349380560ed9a1b31828fffbc19
Exploitation in Sirius Open Source
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Exploitative operations at Sirius ‘Open Source’ and sheer dishonesty should not be too shocking. The company’s management is basing its existence on a lie and old information (official documentation) helps reaffirm this.

THE company I left at the start of the month isn’t what it claims to be. Sirius ‘Open Source’ isn’t about Open Source anymore and the deeper one looks, the clearer it seems that the so-called ‘founder’ (what we’ve referred to him as) isn’t even the founder. I was told years before I joined the company that he had been misrepresenting himself to the media, which caused a stir and almost a lawsuit.

The video above covers the latest relevant posts, starting with the history of the company founded in 1998. Added below are redacted screenshots, showing only addresses in Greater Manchester, not the south-east of England.

Does Sirius (still) give anything back to those whose work it is exploiting? Or does it give a shell about Free software communities?

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is in so much technical, legal, and financial trouble that now it is chasing those who criticise the company, even without naming the company or anyone inside the company; this means that on top of being a ‘parasite’ (preying on Free software with false labeling) the company has become a true enemy of freedom of speech, guarding misbehaving people from their critics

THE company I left is in a state of disarray. The management in question was largely exploiting and seeking to start profiting from (aka ‘monetising’) Free-as-in-freedom software without contributing anything back. In recent years it wasn’t even adopting Free software and instead abandoning it in favour of proprietary spyware. There was no debate about it. It’s a one-way relationship.

Similarly, there was a one-way relationship with staff. People were expected to stay up all night, actually working, while some management in daytime failed to do very basic work, very fundamental tasks. High-tech labour with low-end wages may seem sustainable, but as inflation soars it becomes a stretch. Then, the company as a whole becomes untenable.

This past year I started talking privately about the situation with a friend; names of people and names of companies weren’t included (not even Sirius!), but the company was eager to crush staff, silence staff, and dodge liabilities to staff.

Below we include the second part of an extensive section, which will later be supported by hard evidence.

Sirius urgently needs to rename. It is not doing “Open Source”; instead it rips apart the infrastructure that was Open Source, replacing it with proprietary spyware (for a number of years already; this year the trend accelerated further). “Sirius Open Wash” would be a suitable new name for the company, but maybe it’s too late because the company has no future anyway.

The bullying intensified months ago. Managers basically start with the supposition that all workers are guilty of something and then try to dig for “evidence” to justify the foregone conclusion, making up or exaggerating things while resorting to distortion various rules and regulations (gymnastics in logic), reaching out to things said as far back as 4 years ago (when staff had been subjected to bullying from management).

We certainly would have sued Sirius if it wasn’t so broke and operating through shells, at least one of which registered outside the country.

Text from the report included below:

Roy does not talk about the company where he works, at least not by name. He does not mention people and clients of the company. If Roy discusses that with a friend in some chat outside of work, that’s perfectly within his rights. If the company does something wrong and Roy then discusses it with somebody, that might even be a positive contribution. Nobody should be above criticism. If Roy discusses romantic relationship between colleagues without even naming them, that’s perfectly lawful (there’s no need to twist a romantic relationship as “living arrangement”, covering up for how inadequate that is). As the main issue discussed isn’t the nature of the relationship but the nepotism and abject lack of relevant qualification/s, this is a matter of broader or professional interest. It’s not mere gossip and either way, nobody is named. To be very clear, informal IRC chat with one person is not “social media”; pretending that it is would be considered fact-twisting. IRC has been around since the 1980s, Roy has its own IRC network, and there are no companies or “data broker” chewing up this data. The data is maintained in a privacy-conscious manner on a server managed independently. To some people, very fundamental facts about communication tools leads to evasion of proper understanding, either deliberately or accidentally.

The accusations against Roy mostly latch onto cherry-picking of words, all that while ignoring the underlying substance, which is expressed relatively politely (no expletives, but lots of typos because it’s very informal chat). There seems to be a lot of tit-for-tat over the ‘teat’ (to be clear, the company’s high-paid managers were milking Roy for years; Roy’s salary would have increased with inflation by about 40% in 12 years, but that didn’t happen).

So who’s milking who?