Sirius shown to the public as women-friendly a decade ago

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ was taken to court after it had wrongly fired a couple of employees, one of whom was blind; this was accompanied by lies about why the staff’s communication server was shut down

THE year was 2011 or thereabouts. Sirius hired a kind German lady, was also completely blind. Colleagues were happy to help, but clients were not being informed that she was blind and management feared that clients might find out that she was blind. A year or two later she was fired and simply ‘vanished’; nobody was allowed to talk about that.

This, among other incidents, is an example of a ruthless company that does not tolerate staff dialogue and relies on secrecy (or clients being blind to what really goes on). The relevant part of the report is below.

Blindness to Criticism

The foundations of the company need to be protected, not the personal agenda of pertinent, individual workers and/or cliques/factions of workers. Lack of communication blinds us to our weaknesses. Over a decade ago when the company-wide Jabber server was disabled (probably to prevent unity and sympathy among staff) workers’ ability to interact with colleagues was curtailed, leaving everyone in a position where supporting clients was a lot harder. The widespread belief at the time was that the server was intentionally offline (nobody wanted to talk about it, let alone lie) because the company faced a lawsuit from a couple wrongly accused/dismissed (at least one of them). Roy and Rianne have supported blind people’s charities for nearly a decade already, so recalling how the company treated a blind colleague, likely an innocent colleague, is a bit of deja vu in light of later sections of this document. Roy and Rianne poured in a portion of their income (received monthly from Sirius) into blind people’s charities after the company, Sirius, had unfairly dismissed a legally blind — and much-liked among her colleagues — vulnerable lady.

Sirius was not always criticised or fearful of criticism, certainly not as a whole (criticising one particular aspect of Sirius is not the same as just rejecting Sirius as a whole). In fact the company used to boast true transparency (also full access to the wiki, which Roy helped manage/install), like telling workers not only which clients were paying but also how much they were paying (so it was possible to understand the commercial side of things). In some sense, workers felt connected to the company, not left out to hang. Internal presentations in the company, or even the habitual workshop, gave all workers a lot of information. The accountant and other people met staff in person, offering good advice on a number of things. Not much was outsourced or left behind walled gardens.

Things have changed a lot since then.

This is what I get when I log in

O-called ‘social networks’ (I’ve coined the term “social control networks” for these) are supposed to facilitate a diversity of views. Not threats. Not calls for genocide. These strands of ‘speech’ constitute violations of very particular laws and for defensible reasons. But the point being, let people express their views, even if and when you disagree with these views.

I am not vulgar, I don’t really curse, and I don’t write negatively about vulnerable groups; my criticisms are usually directed at large organisations, institutions, corporations, political parties and so on. I never really considered myself worthy of censorship of any kind, yet Twitter has, on several occasions, shadowbanned me for no reason at all or simply because I was being bullied (shadowban by algorithms can lead to that). Time-limited shadowbans are not so severe because the user is typically not aware of them and can still post (albeit the audience is severely limited, it’s almost like talking to oneself sometimes).

Twitter, to its credit, never ever suspended me. Ever. The funny thing is that people in Mastodon say that I should delete Twitter and not participate in it. Eventually, as it turns out, it’s actually Mastodon that censors me. It’s an actual suspension for which I have not been given reason other than some people reporting me (as if that alone merits action, DMCA-style).

I am guessing that the suspension will eventually be undone, but that may still result in self-censorship. I was actually very surprised when it happened and spent over an hour investigating what I assumed to be a technical fault. The above says “error”; it does not tell me that I got suspended.

As Mastodon has just suspended me (mastodon.technology to be precise), I believe it can do it to virtually anyone. Apparently all it takes is a complaint citing something from the rather vague ToS, which can be interpreted as “don’t cause people offense” (or make an “oppressive” environment — whatever exactly that may mean). Even without insulting any other user — let alone a mention of another user — one’s views/links can apparently get one the ‘boot’, without as little as due process of some kind.

Mastodon was always known to be tough on Nazis; it was known that they were strict on free speech only to a degree. After the treatment that I received yesterday, however, I can no longer recommend Mastodon. It may be Free software, but it’s very weak on free speech.

The most insulting thing about all this is that I wrote many hundreds of toots/tweets/other in favour of Mastodon, urging people to join. I also wrote a lot in that platform and had amicable conversations there. To be treated this poorly by Mastodon admins hurts somewhat.

Update:

Mastodon Censored Me for a Long Time, They Just Found an Excuse to Ban Me As Well

So, after an E-mail exchange it turned out they had been silencing my posts for a long time, simply because of volume (people alerted me about this omission of posts, but I foolishly chose to believe it was due to a software bug) and it all ended when, totally out of the blue, I got banned without them even informing me (again, making it all look like a technical error/glitch, which I spent a long time trying to diagnose). The trigger was used was “Islamophobia” — I presume a link to some news article whose content someone found to be offensive. Everything was done to avoid showing me that they had been censoring me for a long time, albeit quietly.

There’s a lot at stake for me: Losing thousands of connections (people), tens of thousands of posts and replies, and no migration option (I cannot even log in to export anything!). They’re suppressing speech and then canning me, in spite of me being among the most popular users.

Identi.ca did something similar 4.5 years ago, though it was not censorship but merely a migration that nuked everyone’s posts.

hen oil rigs/platforms sink (recall this incident) a lot of people die. When gas pipes explode a lot of people can die as well. In the case of BP, Microsoft Windows was at least partly to blame for the incident (I wrote about this many times at Techrights) and the above, just (re)published by Wikileaks, makes one wonder where the US derives its moral high ground from. This shows the importance of using software one can truly control and always trust, such as Free/Libre software.

ccasionally, in numerical programming, one may wish to plot or instantiate a grid of a circular (or spiral) nature. Here are some code samples for those trying to achieve it. The following sets some values of interest:

lines=10
degrees=180

Now, let us generate some linear, equally-spaced points:

t_map = linspace(0,lines*pi*2,lines*degrees*2);

What we have here is the 2 for 360 degrees, which may depend on what one tries to achieve. For the more complex case shown later, this will be essential. Now, let’s do the sine/cosine magic:

x_map = t_map.*cos(t_map);
y_map = t_map.*sin(t_map);

This can be plotted with plot(x_map, y_map), but let’s do something more interesting by assigning colour to the sample points and then plotting them as dense dots. The following would work:

flat=zeros(1000,1000);
  for ll=(size(x_map,2)/2):-1:1
    flat(floor(x_map(ll*2))'+500,floor(y_map(ll*2))'+500)=1
  end
imshow(flat)

The values here are rather arbitrary and can be used for demonstrative purposes. The problem itself seems to be commonly recurring, thus the need for a blog post. Different colours can be assigned to sample points, which achieves something like the following:

his Octave ramble is an experimental video where I try to present some elements of the program before preparing something more professionally put. In this part of a series I go just through some elements of QtOctave and show how it is used in practice. In the future I will prepare something much more polished that is planned in advance.

ORKING with bare metal for the purpose of maximal hardware utilisation and performance is not the same as working with typical computer programs. Developing software for research is also different from software development for end users, where the software is treated as a product. Different scenarios require different methodologies and different levels of polish, and thus have different specifications and priorities. In research, brute force becomes essential to the success of one group or another.

I often find myself working on servers or clusters (only GNU/Linux), in which case it is useful to manage up to 50 computers, for example, remotely, at the same time. With full GUI sessions it can be a disorienting task, but that too can be achieved and I wrote about it roughly 6 years ago in this blog (back when I was a Ph.D. student).

Working from the command line at a desktop is perfectly acceptable if brains and not candy count, so platforms like Mac OS X are irrelevant. To do coding on the server I currently use vi as the editor in one terminal and the MATLAB session in another. On the desktop I would use QtOctave, as covered before (also in some screencasts). Unfortunate issues that had me revisit MATLAB (which in any case would be inevitable as means of ensuring compatibility with colleagues) led me back to the old days of developing over SSH (using KIO slaves and the likes of that). Quick access to the file can be gained using abbreviated wrappers such as:

./Main/Programs/Scripts/SSH/42
/opt/matlab/bin/matlab -nodesktop -nosplash -r "addpath(genpath('/home/S00/schestr0/'))"

where 42 is a script numbered after the machine number and the latter command initialises the command line. /home/S00/schestr0/ is using NFS and it can be reached from any computer at the department at the same time (multiple machines can write to the filesystem at the same time, too). If the files are edited locally, they can be passed across to the server using a simple command that transfers them in encrypted form.

scp /home/roy/Main/IT/Programs/get_dicom_heart/* -r
schestr0@eng041.cs.man.ac.uk:/home/S00/schestr0/get_dicom_heart/

Occasional local backups (usually nightly because it is resources-intensive over USB2) are achieved as follows:

mkdir /media/disk/Home/`date +%Y-%m-%d`

tar -cf - /home/roy|split -b 1000m - /media/disk/Home/`date +%Y-%m-%d`/Home-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar.

To decipher this, try:

man tar
man split

For example in:

tar -cf - /media/SEA_DISK/Home/|split -b 1000m - Baine-`date +%Y-%m-%d`

the backup is split into chunks of 1 gigabyte and the files are named by the date

To reassemble the above (resorting from backups):

cat *|tar -xf - 

No command line interface should be intimidating. Many powerful computer tasks are managed from it because the command line makes streamlining simpler and scripting jobs is a lot easier. My programs are written in a way that enables assigning many parameters like paths and wildcards, which lets the programs run for many hours and automatically produce output like images, videos, and text for inspection later. Research in computer vision or computer graphics requires heavy computation and for compelling experiments, the larger the sample sets, the more convincing the results. Use of computer resources therefore becomes the difference between failure and success and those who fail to master it can easily perish against the competition. Another valuable skill is knowing how to reuse code (legally of course) and this is where free/libre software orientation helps a lot. Publication in Open Access (OA) and availability of one’s own work — including code — can help gain more citations, which is the currency by which many publications are being judged.

ESTERDAY I encountered my first major setback in Octave for Kubuntu. It was a bug, not a missing feature. It involved an outside library again. I tried installing a newer version of gnuplot (installing the latest one by compiling the source code), but this did not resolve the issue. All in all, over an hour was spent on it, first assuming that I was coding wrongly and later realising that the issue was upstream (there are many more threads like this and they dominate the discussion on the matter). Applying the patch manually would only be a short-term solution as it was already submitted for inclusion in future releases, so for the time being, where this function is needed, I will reluctantly be testing the code under MATLAB (for which I have an academic licence that everyone gets whether they want to or not). It was rather depressing to use MATLAB for a few hours yesterday. Compatibility will be assured again when the little issue (fixable with just a line or a few) is addressed also in the binaries offered by GNU/Linux distributions. Apart from that I’m having Fedora-Octave-ImageMagick compatibility issues [1, 2], which help not at all.

My overall experience with Octave is pleasant and it remains by far the primary choice for image analysis. But for others who insist on using MATLAB I must ensure cross-compatibility, thus the following (under Fedora):

The image shows the interface which now precedes the tracking phase. Points can be placed by the user with text guidance in the console. The interfaces were also improved to separate between rectangular, circular, and manual placements.

Here is an example image without the interface.