Context: Data Contradiction Means Office for National Statistics (ONS) Began Shamelessly Lying About Number of Dead People

Also see (newer): Seems Like a Trend: British Government Messing With the Data to Defend COVID-19 Policies

New video:

Days ago:

Data Contradiction Means Office for National Statistics (ONS) Began Shamelessly Lying About Number of Dead People

See start of this video:

This refers to this video.

Description of video above:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

? Richard Feynman

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1429989.Richard_P_Feynman

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com

The answer

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/myocarditis_and_pericarditis#incoming-2179696

Totals for inflammatory heart disease

2019 3,151 (baseline)

2020 12, 267 (x 3.8)

(December 2020, UK covid vaccinations start)

2021 18,963 (x 6)

2022 24,642 (x 7.8)

2022, that’s 7.2% of the catchment population

Age profiles not given

Great Western Hospital

3,100 staff, 435 beds

Trust catchment population is currently approximately 340,000.

https://accs.severndeanery.nhs.uk/about-us/hosp/the-great-western-hospitals-nhs-trust-swindon/

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/

So x 202 for UK population

Extrapolating for UK population = 4.9 million

The UKs, Yellow card scheme, updated on 23rd November 2022

https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting

Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, 177,925 Yellow Cards reports

AstraZeneca vaccine, 246,866 Yellow Cards reports

Moderna vaccine, 47,045 Yellow card reports

Total, (with Novavax and adverse reactions when the brand was not specified),

474,018 adverse events

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

Yellow card scheme, Don’t wait for someone else to report it

https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/yellow-card-please-help-to-reverse-the-decline-in-reporting-of-suspected-adverse-drug-reactions

Only 10% of serious reactions reported

Only 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported via yellow cards.

Some specific adverse reactions

Severe allergic reactions

Transverse myelitis

Thrombo-embolic events with concurrent low platelets

Menstrual disorders and unexpected vaginal bleeding

Guillain-Barré Syndrome

Myocarditis and pericarditis

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency describes this pathology as ‘very rare’.

Up to 23rd November 2022

Following Pfizer/BioNTech covid vaccines

851 reports of myocarditis

579 reports of pericarditis

10 reports of carditis

Following AstraZeneca covid vaccination

241 reports of myocarditis

226 reports of pericarditis

9 reports of endocarditis

Following Moderna covid vaccination

251 reports of myocarditis

149 reports of pericarditis

3 reports of carditis

This totals 2,377 ‘very rare’ cases of heart inflammation.

Only 10% of serious reactions reported

Only 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported via yellow cards.

Video download link | md5sum 84f018c1290b8f233c66af03884b4fbc
Worker Isolation Tactics
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Companies rarely/barely tolerate people who speak about wrongdoing, whether it is done internally (to management or among colleagues) or externally without naming anyone; at Sirius there has been a culture of gagging and isolation, hoping to prevent clients and the wider public finding out what’s truly going on, but it is time to break the silence

THE latest (and one before last) part of our report is just about the thirtieth, focusing on how management at Sirius ‘Open Source’ was trying to prevent staff talking to one another. This strategy isn’t entirely unique and there are several names for it.

The video above discusses what went on and why a witch-hunt began. Sirius ‘Open Source’ is not Open Source and it has been doing unethical as well as illegal things. It’s trying to prevent staff knowing about it and being able to discuss such matters. But at the end there’s a bit of a Streisand effect.

The saddest thing is, the company’s management also lies about itself. For instance, one new boss was introduced as a person who had created a successful company, however the public record indicates that this is either a dissolved two-person company (failed and forcibly de-registered) or a one-man ‘company’ with barely any activity in it. Extravagant claims to impress the easily-impressionable? If a one-person company is “successful” according to that one person, does that even mean anything? Look what he has done to Sirius. The company is shrinking into nothing (more ‘managers’ than technical people).

Big egos turns big companies into tiny boutiques with big debt.

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

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.

Summary: Around 4 years ago some of the most essential staff of Sirius Open Source suddenly left the company, even at short notice (the management was trying to hide this, but abstaining from any remarks on this matter became unsustainable); it’s probable that abusive management played a considerable role in this ongoing demolition of Sirius Open Source

THIS part (one of 4 in the corresponding long section) deals with the beginning of the end of Sirius ‘Open Source’, which began to do irrational and occasionally dubious (maybe illegal) things, leading to the collapse of the company and coinciding with the collapse of the founder’s marriage. A certain “management cabal” was covertly forming, based on perceived loyalty if not kinship, publicly insulting the former manager and former wife (who even contacted clients after the divorce) while treating longtime staff like rubbish. It was about 4 years ago. This part does not deal with anyone’s personal life, but it’s impossible to understand Sirius and its unfortunate demise without grasping that issues in the personal life of the founder triggered a whole bunch of commercial issues, and management vacuum was hurriedly filled up by incompetent bullies who lie to everybody and never admit mistakes. These people don’t know how to manage, were never trained in management, and they compensated for inner insecurities by acting aggressively against sceptics.

There’s this quasi-twofold issue: as the company employs based on nepotism, in spite of a lack of any relevant qualifications and/or experience (even managers; they don’t know “Open Source”), the company ends up with nontechnical Windows users in technical roles. This means clients cannot be wooed — or existing contracts secured/renewed — for technical tasks, so the nature of contracts becomes increasingly clerical — not technical — and as Windows has back doors among many other security problems the whole security model becomes farcical. On issues pertaining to a lack of skills and nepotism, please stay tuned until next month.

In a nutshell, as this section shall hopefully demonstrate, the management of Sirius basically destroyed and dismantled the company with years-old failures and an endless string of bad decisions, lacking any consultation with those impacted, who are also proficient. And why? Well, because to the “cabal” it is a vanity project; they know everything! And at the same time they know nothing. Sadly for them, eventually they end up without a company, without an employer, without a job of their own. So well done! Own goal.

As somebody explained to me earlier today, sometimes people are blinded, and more so if they’re upset and angry. They’re too confident and the ego is becoming way too big, and hence they wear blinders and see nothing else that may make actual sense. Due to emotions and impulses they destroyed the company. It’s too late now. They recently discovered that they had destroyed the company and now they focus on how to try to not only suppress this series but also remove anything that was published so far. This isn’t a company run by grown-ups but by cartoon-obsessed and over-confident “superheroes” (in their own minds).

Here is the first part of the section in the report. It is entitled The Bullying Era because bullying is what best sums up what was happening back then. Not bullying among staff like peers and colleagues but bullying from the management (i.e. top-down), along with false allegations, accusations, and sometimes fabrications.

In this first part we present some background about the status quo around 2018. Later we’ll show some bullying examples.

The Bullying Era

This section is essential. Without it, the sentiments of Roy and Rianne or their relationship with the company cannot be fully grasped.

Several years ago there was management change. It seems to have resulted in the company becoming a lot smaller and poorly managed. Staff did communicate some of the concerns, as those concerns were shared across teams and colleagues (unionisation is difficult in very small companies). To quote one message seen: “I’m gratified to know you’re with us in all this. We’re a lot stronger as a group. I regret to see we’re all being bullied, typically with bogus allegations and our health is affected. I did face the management over this, albeit privately.”

The management likes to think it lives in a tall tower on a hill, enjoying total control over minds and hearts. But when many people get treated very unfairly and truly badly they’re likely to talk to one another.

Preliminary research helped elucidate pertinent facts about the company. There was a list of things we know and things we would only speculate about at that point. Facts:

– When Roy joined the company his per-hour rate was higher than now (almost 12 years later). Some colleagues receive different pay for the exact same role. For instance, some years ago it could be confirmed that some overnight NOC staff received a salary of 21,000 pounds per annum, whereas colleagues got paid about 25% more. They did the exact same role.

– a key colleague no longer appeared to be in the company, as confirmed (we believe) by the VPN renewal table. Roy warned or politely cautioned management not to lose technical staff and named him specifically.

– One colleague once spoke about being “shareholder” or similar with the CEO, but this was not communicated to any of the colleagues.

– The CEO was angry at a long-serving colleague when he left, one might only suppose due to the very short notice. Managing core functions at the company became almost impossible and some clients could not be served, resulting in complaints later mis-attributed (wrong people blamed rather than those who lost the principal colleague).

– The Sirius office was, at that point, virtually empty and must have cost at least a grand a month just to rent (workers were almost sure it’s rented, as the shutdown in 2020 helped confirm). This seemed like a mis-allocation of funds or priorities.

– Company meetings were canceled without any reason given — not a positive sign at all.

– No transparency about departure of workers. One had to guess or rely on gossip.

– Some colleagues, who had more inside information (because of physical office access), decided to leave the company

– Moving to AWS was about lowering costs, but those costs have (expectedly) risen to something comparable to a salary, set aside issues associated with autonomy, privacy etc. This was short-sighted.

– Moving or changing the NOC’s night cover from 4 people to 3 people was also about lowering costs, but that meant really awful and unhealthy sleeping patterns for all those involved. Despite assurances this would improve, nothing ever happened and no redemption came. People who work in daytime cannot fully understand what it involves to work overnight and change the night hours half a dozen times a month (like jet lag, maybe even worse due to short intervals).

– The new manager knew the Sirius CEO for a long time (circumstances or context not fully known but it may be professional, like the Open Source Consortium, which the CEO claimed to be the leader/founder of but apparently wasn’t; there was a mis-representation in the press; Roy met the person behind the Open Source Consortium, who wished to point out he had wanted to sue the Sirius CEO for defamation over it but said it would be too expensive and thus unworthy of pursuing).

– At some time around that point the Director of the company (in the UK) was US-based and even insinuated to staff that many NOC operations would be shifted to the US (that never actually happened).