Video download link | md5sum 31260807834863dcb60ccf64d9155b42
Sirius Failure to Pay Providers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO and other ‘management’ staff are to blame for major outages/downtimes clients were experiencing; while they were busy eating or pretending to be busy it was the technical staff taking 24/7 support calls and fighting to restore services (after management failed to pay bills, even repeatedly, in spite of repeated reminders)

THE video above covers a clear (slam-dunk) case of gross incompetence/negligence by managers at Sirius. We’ll be showing more examples later this month. From the clients’ perspective, such gross incompetence by Sirius management may merit a refund (failing to meet SLAs for sure) and would typically constitute gross misconduct — albeit only in a company that actually holds managers too accountable (they won’t hold themselves accountable and step down/resign upon failure; instead they say absurd things). Mr. “Art of the Deal” is no good role model unless we ran a truly scammy operation.

One client even said it bluntly to our manager, accusing the company of “incompetence” (the examples below are only the managers’ fault)

Summary: Dishonesty and non-technical problems became a norm under the new Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO (or under his watch); today we give one client’s story as an example or a case study, where Sirius management is failing to pay upstream providers, resulting in catastrophes

THE “finaliser” of the company may not be the only misguided manager (or saboteur). He turned out to be the barrier and the burier [sic] of the company.

Today we give as an example two separate incidents impacting twice the same client, one year apart. Cause of outage? Not faulty hardware. Not faulty software, either. It was unpaid bills. Who failed to pay? Sirius. The client trusted Sirius to take care of it. Big mistake.

Without naming the client or the nature of the client’s work, let’s just say that it is a critical client, a longtime client (longest), which relies on real-time access to data and cannot afford downtimes (not long downtimes anyway; as alluded/hinted in this meme last month, the effects would potentially be devastating).

Sirius failed to pay providers in two countries. The first such incident apparently didn’t serve as sufficient warning. No lessons learned. Or maybe no money left in the bank. Remember that it also looks like Sirius could barely pay its own staff; it’s like they failed to pay our pension on several occasions/years; thankfully the pension provider started sending us more and more letters to warn us; it was waiting to report the company, maybe even impose penalties/fines as a result.

Making fun of companies or persons who cannot pay bills is no source for amusement/mockery, but if one company fails to pay another the latter may fail to pay its bills or even its staff. So that’s not fair. We’re not talking about food bills here; it’s stuff like hosting. They kept warning, repeatedly, before taking action (e.g. an E-mail saying payment was “overdue” and lots of warnings before that, for several months in fact).

Was the client properly informed about what had happened or were those incidents brushed under the carpet, swept under some rug somewhere? This is the sort of stuff that made me unhappy about the company. The latter incident happened just months ago. I decided not to contact the client and instead hope the company would confess. That never happened though. A host wasn’t being paid for a very long time and then it issued warnings which escalated in severity. The client might also want to ask this host and see if there are overdue invoices right now (in 2023). Months ago the client had a very major outage after Sirius had racked up thousands of pounds in unpaid hosting bills (while trying to sell the client AWS ‘clown computing’, which would be vastly more expensive and I internally opposed efforts to move to it).

It’s absurd that pointing out such embarrassing realities would be deemed ‘defaming’ a company (with facts). The liars love to claim that everyone who says the truth is engaged in “defamatory” behaviour, as if defamation and truth became synonyms. The egoistic boss fails to understand that a company is not a person and facts are not defamation.

When an incident happened in 2021 the handover said: “Logged onto their portal and server is suspended due to unpaid invoice. Raised it with everyone on Slack, and xxxxx told me to tell xxxxx that we’re raising an important ticket with them. xxxxx paid the invoice and they lifted the suspension.”

The Slack messages at the time:

xxxxx: Does anyone know if xxxxx has been paid yet as xxxxx says he can’t get onto xxxxx
xxxxx: xxxxx is asking for an update. Can we pay xxxxx tonight or will we have to wait until tomorrow?
xxxxx: They have a fairly old-school process for accepting payment if I recall. It took a number of days to clear payment last time.
xxxxx: xxxxx and/or xxxxx put the payment through last time to a specific bank account.

“It took a number of days to clear payment last time,” it says. Not the first time. Lessons not learned.

This is similar to the excuses we got when our pension wasn’t paid (on two separate years), even several months after the days in question. They blame the payment processor instead of those who failed (e.g. forgot) to make the payment!

Three months ago another rather similar incident happened, but this time in another country and another hosting provider. There was no mention of what had happened after the Big Boss was shuffling lots of credit cards, struggling to make a payment to the provider. To quote: “xxxxx and xxxxx emailed to say that xxxxx was down but we didn’t get any alerts so looked into it. Then one of their customers emailed to say they couldn’t login. xxxxx asked me to restart UIs which I did and the problem was resolved. xxxxx sent some questions to ask xxxxx who said he will look into it and get back to them tomorrow. I checked the db connections and there seems to be 380 open out of a possible 1000, but I’m sure xxxxx will be able to verify this too.”

Nothing was said about the failure to pay the bills. Are we meant to think nothing actually happened? Are we meant to lie to clients about this, wasting their time as they try hard to figure our the root cause?

Don’t work for chronic liars. If your employer starts lying a lot, consider your options.

Video download link | md5sum 8a0c716f5505ae9716a939a2824a5a3e
Sirius False Pretences
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO built his repertoire on lies; technical staff did antagonise these lies, but it did not help; today I show how he lied about what had initiated his “investigation” and the company lied about his predecessor, too (they’ve managed to ‘normalise’ deceit all across the board)

THE company I left last month is a lot dodgier than I had realised (from within). We shall see where the shells go… US? Another residential address in the UK? How far does the nepotism go and can any Sirius worker be honest about what’s going on? A company that is honest to staff and to clients doesn’t have such issues; it doesn’t need to hide lots of skeletons in a closet. Just be honest and consistency will follow (as opposed to shuffling excuses and phony timelines).

A lot went wrong with the company when the CEO took money from the Gates Foundation under an NDA; proving a correlation is hard, but things have never been the same. The bullying against my wife and I started only weeks later (same time I was investigating extremely damning things about Bill Gates).

The video above focuses on one rather obvious example of lying. It starts with me showing our Cisco phone (now obsolete) and lousy copy-paste job by the CEO, in effect reusing accusations against two different people. Towards the end it shows the latest meme and article. That article shows how the CEO was stalking IRC and when he saw a name mentioned he decided to use that as a sort of pretext (to make it seem like a client had complained). He not only used this unrelated mention to allege somebody had complained; he took it further than this to do the same to my wife. But I spoke to the person in question. The person did not complain. The CEO of Sirius is lying. The company is basically built on a thick layer of lies.

To conclude the video, it’s worth mentioning that the ‘original’ terrible manager (not the wife of the CEO, who was the predecessor, but a former colleague of his from the Open Source Consortium) already damaged the morale of all the staff. Many left weeks/months later and those who stayed were suffering abuse. We’ve mentioned it many times, as that is how things deteriorated 4 years ago, but we need to emphasise it again.

The company said that she went away for a long holiday and then silence… she would never come back. How mysterious. That was a lie. Months passed and not a word was spoken; then one of the colleagues, who had suffered abuse from her, asked if she is ever coming back. The rest of us also wondered, “Where is she? Is she still on a holiday?”

The company didn’t even bother to reply. She just vanished without a trace… good riddance. But why lie about her going on holiday? This wasn’t the only time colleagues were just vanishing without an explanation. We gave examples last month. In short, the predecessor and the current CEO are the same awful imposters, only the gender has changed, and some of the workers might say the current one is even worse. Worst ever.

O it’s finally time!

This site is already 20 and the blog was created in 2004, i.e. 19 years ago. In the early days, the “golden era” (or dawn) of personal blogs, I used to write here every day. In 2006 a lot of focus shifted to Techrights, so this space became mostly neglected. That sort of changed last year, more so after I had resigned from my job. Now this blog is a lot more active (again) and has just crossed a nice milestone: 2,500 blog posts. Nowhere near the 35,000 of Techrights, but this blog is personal.

OME days ago I ranted about totally useless ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ that are falsely marketed as making things easier even though in practice they mostly offload/outsource all/most of the actual work to the clients. Their real purpose is to lessen expenses for private companies that formerly had actual staff, offering actual service (of course those useless ‘apps’ and ‘Web sites’ also lead to a severe unemployment problems).

Today people are ‘meant’ to study how to do all their banking (different interface for each bank), how to process and package their groceries (different machines and different programs in each chain of stores). The list goes on and on. Apparently many people are self-taught ‘masters’ of how to manage water bills and power bills ‘online’ or with ‘apps’. This means no trail of paper either. Is that a plus?

I don’t mean to blow a bubble here. I’m far from the first person to complain (or even rant about this repeatedly). The world is becoming a more difficult place. Technology was meant to simplify life, to make life easier through automation. So how did we end up having to ‘learn’ (self-train) a lot more? This is not progress.

Case of point: I want to move my pension away from some awful provider. I have no online account and don’t wish to create one. I paid into this particular pension for 5 years. In the ‘old’ days (say, 1990s) I’d probably phone some number and it would get done by a specialist. Today, it’s almost impossible to even find a contact form on a site; they suggest creating a Web site “account” (as a person with a pension there I already have an account!) or downloading some “app”. Sorry, not everyone complicates or worsens one’s life with so-called ‘smart’ ‘phones’. Some of us have better ways of getting things done. After several days of them not responding to a complaint of mine I once again told them (in a faceless, voiceless Webform): “Please e-mail me or phone me to arrange this.”

Time will tell if they even bother. If bad service persists, maybe I’ll name the company. It’s pushing my patience (a week already).

False pretences by a lying boss

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ CEO seems to be lying about clients, not just lying to clients; it’s used as an excuse for a witch-hunt against Sirius staff

TWO days ago we showed that the CEO asked to speak “urgently” with Rianne. A day before that we showed he had said the same to me, her husband. Same words, as shown here before (we shared a complete trail of correspondence).

He said there was a “matter that has been brought to my attention” and to paraphrase what he said to Rianne while he recorded her, a client complained about being mentioned by me. But who is this client that caused the CEO to see or envision an “urgent” need to “discuss a matter that has been brought to my attention?”

Who is it?

It’s a client, he claimed, but he did not name anyone. Two weeks later he showed a supposed piece of evidence, but that did not match what we could verify. Hence, we believe he was lying on the call. He was trying to make up excuses for his proactive stalking. To Rianne he said something to the effect of, I want you to come to the meeting because someone brought this to my attention… and on the phone he insisted that the investigation was initiated because of an outsider. He was quite likely lying about that, basically manufacturing a set of false pretenses.

We’re dealing with a big problem here. We’ve been dealing with this kind of problem for a whole year. We have a pathological liar running the business based on a foundation of lies he cannot remember or keep up with.

After I saw who’s said to have been mentioned in IRC (only once and with a typo; it’s a famous person anyway — one who is known to millions of people and whose name is mentioned on the Internet every day) I decided to get in touch and fact-check the accuser.

As readers are aware, the accuser was in deep denial over the LastPass breach (more on that later this month; we wrote a lot about it last month). He kept rejecting the idea LastPass was not secure. Even a year ago one colleague said to all peers in a “Handover to Shift 1 (16/07/21)” that “I’ve found that emailing stuff from Lastpass doesn’t actually work, so if he doesn’t receive the email then this might be the issue. Is sending via Lastpass any more secure than sending via our email?”

I wasn’t the only person antagonising LastPass. The technical staff didn’t like LastPass and didn’t trust it. But management did not care. LastPass is assumed to be right even when it’s lying. Same as Sirius management.

Anyway, after the LastPass breach was confirmed by LastPass itself (just before Christmas; this timing was chosen by LastPass and was intentional… to lessen the damage) I informed the person whom the accuser insinuated had complained.

Here’s my message to him:

Report of LastPass Breach, Your xxxxxxxxx Passwords Compromised

Hi xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,

Sorry for the bad timing, but LastPass intentionally reported this when people were away on holiday.

People have a moral responsibility to do what’s ethical and a duty or implicit obligation to properly inform clients so as to avert major disasters (like systems and Web sites getting hijacked/defaced over the holidays).

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23523322/lastpass-data-breach-cloud-encrypted-password-vault-hackers

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2022/12/23/lastpass-password-vaults-stolen-by-hackers-change-your-master-password-now/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/lastpass-says-hackers-have-obtained-vault-data-and-a-wealth-of-customer-info/

I’m writing to you as a Sirius veteran. I worked in the company for nearly 12 years. I know that your passwords (maybe private keys also) are in LastPass and LastPass got compromised. Now even LastPass itself admits it. In simple terms, this means hostile actors may now possess complete copies of access credentials and can in turn access your systems directly or indirectly, along with data etc. This poses a ransomware threat and can result in penalties for improper data protection.

I’ve personally warned about this for years (specifically LastPass). I brought up security breaches in LastPass, but I got threatened for my concerns. The company lacks basic understanding of security. To make matters worse, my warnings were used to push me out and Sirius did the same to my wife, who didn’t even say anything. It’s collective punishment for doing the moral thing.

You need to study what the LastPass breach means to you because Sirius put your sensitive data (keys/passwords) in LastPass.

Knowing the style of management at Sirius, I’m sure they’ll use some defamatory smears and ad hominem attacks/lies against me, but the simple fact is, you must change passwords and keys NOW.

I resigned from Sirius earlier this month; they still use LastPass and failed to respond each time I brought up the issue, including less than a month ago. There are many other issues inside the company, but they go well beyond the LastPass threat: http://techrights.org/wiki/Sirius_Open_Source

Sincerely,

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz

Within a few hours he responded to my E-mail as follows:

Thanks very much Roy for the information. We had a very good working relationship with you and take the threat seriously. We wish you success in your future endeavours and we’ll be in touch. I wish you happy holidays and a very good new year!

Sent from xxxxxxxx
Regards, xxxxxxxx

So it was already obvious from his tone or the words that he did not complain about being mentioned.

So I went on and explained to him what had happened:

If you don’t mind me adding something, please see the attached.

This is from the letter xxxxxxxx sent to my wife months after in some very, very informal IRC channel (lots of typos, too) I had mentioned your good journalism though only after someone in the channel linked to one of your articles, not knowing that I was supporting xxxxxxxx. He has been my friend for over 15 years, but I never told him about clients. I kept that confidential.

xxxxxxxx insisted that I had mentioned a name of a client (you are very famous regardless if client or not) only when someone else (not me) linked to your work. He might want xxxxxxxx to think it’s done routinely, but you were the only such person I mentioned (and only once). There were only a handful of people in that IRC channel, all technical people.

He intimidated my wife, who had nothing to do with this, and insinuated that you contacted the company to complain because your name was mentioned. He gave only one such example, so we were simply left to assume you complained. In reality, we believe xxxxxxxx went on a fishing expedition, spending several weeks trying to frame me and when he saw your name (with a typo even!) he thought he found something to leverage in order to get rid of me (despite doing nothing wrong; they just cannot afford to pay workers!).

This is from the letters sent to my wife (yes, like an authoritarian regime) to engage in punishment through a loved one, rendering her unemployed and unable to support her parents in xxxxxxxx. He accused her of breaching rules because her spouse mentioned your name in some very tiny IRC channel a long time ago. This isn’t how investigation gets done; it is a witch-hunt.

I’m telling you this because they likely kept you in the dark about what they had been doing. Attached are the portions of the letter regarding the accusations against Rianne and the so-called ‘evidence’, which is a two-person IRC chat (myself talking to an old-time friend whom I do activism with, including thousands of press links about xxxxxxxx).

Kind regards,

Roy

The attachment is a screenshot that shows his name. It is carefully redacted below to avoid identification (by words, name, date, and URL):

To summarise, it seems rather apparent that Sirius clients did not complain about me. This was likely about an insecure CEO (without experience) trying to silence a dissenting voice of reason, who simply refused to lie to clients.

New video:

Description:

Excess deaths, (2016 to 2019, and 2021)

In November 2022

47,611 deaths registered in England

4,083 deaths (9.4%) above the November five-year average

Coronavirus (COVID-19) (2.6% of all deaths)

W / E 23rd December (England and Wales

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/latest

Number of deaths was above the five-year average

Private homes
(37.5% above, 1,120 excess deaths)

Hospitals
(18.8% above, 1,031 excess deaths)

Care homes
(10.5% above; 282 excess deaths)

Other settings
(7.0% above, 61 excess deaths)

Zoe data

https://health-study.joinzoe.com

Prevalence, One in 21

ONS prevalence data

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19/latestinsights

4.52% in England (1 in 20 people)

5.70% in Wales (1 in 18 people)

6.43% in Northern Ireland (1 in 16 people)

4.05% in Scotland (1 in 25 people)

And the real numbers are likely even higher.