HE words we heard are turning out to be true.

IBM is basically collapsing. Some broadcasters learn early about the impending mass layoffs.

he other day we visited MediaCityUK, where some building projects appear to be a failure (probably not enough apartment units sold).

It was a bright, sunny day and we stayed there to feed birds, eat snacks, and soak in some sunlight. Not much has changed in the place since 10 years ago.

Sometimes I still get spammed by estate companies trying to sell “properties” in MediaCityUK. The place has not developed much (further) in recent years and the Therme Manchester water resort is built near the Trafford Centre, not Old Trafford. Many shops in the Lowry are ‘boarded up’ and shut. It looks like a failed mall.

12 years ago we looked around at homes (advertised around MediaCityUK). We’re glad we chose not to go ahead with that.

Some place in Manchester develop and thrive, whereas others lose momentum.

I tried hard to find contact details, I then opened a ticket about it, confirmed to be opened (by receipt).

Now, after a week, not a single person has acted on it.

They have just sent another automated nag to my wife on her birthday.

Yes, their bots bother her on her birthday and nobody there even deals with the ticket!

This is an insensitive and dysfunctional company with no person to speak to.

Avoid.

T seems like Apple is the latest in GAFAM to openly admit a round of mass layoffs. It went too far, lost billion on a misguided project, and now people will have to go.

“Bring back the corporate death penalty”, an article published 3 days ago by Salon.com, said: “I’m a huge fan of the corporate death penalty, a legal process in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or stop existing…”

If you want to do good, then start a trophy hunt for corruption-filled corporations. Expose their bad deeds, receive recognition for it.

Companies are not people. Killing them is not murder. If those companies kill people, then killing those companies will save people.

If you think Apple is an innocent company, start looking into its sweatshops and the conditions there. Apple pays about 1% of the revenue of an iPhone to the people who actually make the darn thing.

• 2026-08-05 ^14:04 The Establishment, Cambridge, Steve McIntyre & Debian suicide cluster
• 2026-08-05 ^14:27 Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Starts Spending Big Money in an Effort to Resist Lawsuit From Daniel Pocock
• 2026-08-05 ^14:45 How to Dehumanise a Triple National

Maybe one day we’ll know who’s spending like a million pounds on lawfare against my wife and I.

“I think I might have found an offer,” someone told me today about job-seeking. “But it involves pitching credit cards to people.”

It is a “common dilemma,” I told him. Sometimes people do evil things and then pretend to themselves they are detached from the evil because they’re desperate to make an income. More principled people will quit, irrespective of the financial fallout.

Sometimes some of us joke about hypothetical “AI” products.

I thought I had seen it all.

Today in the Sunday Market there was an entire stall devoted to AI glasses.

What does this mean?

I did not ask.

I didn’t even need to ask.

Seeing it was enough.

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ are being passively tolerated by those who knowingly or unknowingly facilitated them; today we focus again on NOW: Pensions, which is based here in Manchester

THE corrupt company that I left in December is becoming one heck of a hot mess. The pension providers, however, aren’t taking it seriously enough and do not respond fast enough. The video above explains the latest from NOW: Pensions, a company based here in Manchester. Strangely enough neither myself nor my wife (who also left the company in December) can remember ever signing up with this pension provider. No paperwork, no signature, no plan specified. What sort of pension gets offered without even consent being expressed? The whole thing seems rather dodgy. Last night my wife attempted to access the portal, only to discover that they had changed it. She could not get in until she changed her password in a password recovery process. Even then, in the new portal, it wasn’t clear what was signed for (nothing) and how it started. So a company that committed pension fraud for at least 5 years just enrolled staff without giving even the most basic details. One lingering suspicion is that one type of pension fraud was substituted with another in 2016, mayube a case of kickbacks, e.g. the CEO passing workers’ money to an old friend using some scheme managed by a dodgy provider, a serial violator that already paid fines and isn’t providing a good service.

At the end of the day this whole thing bodes rather badly not just for companies that claim they’re “Open Source” (but gradually move away from it) but also for pension providers in the UK. They seem to be somewhat complicit in the scam and even after months of effort, with multiple victims being actively involved, there’s little or no concrete progress. the Pension Regulator isn’t enough to tackle this.

Summary: The real-world threats faced by private companies or non-profit organisations aren’t covered by the ISO certification mill; today we publish the last post on this topic before proceeding to some practical examples

WORKING for a company that publicly and openly boasts 2 ISO certifications means that expectations (or perception) can be compared to reality. At Sirius ‘Open Source’, where I had worked since 2011, I saw all sorts of poor security practices, even in more recent years when ISO certifications were bragged about to existing/potential clients.

There is no point trying to deflect the attention to accuser. At the moment the company is too broke for workers to sue (and eventually truly win in a monetary sense); it’s also too broke for its clients to sue. Winning in court against an insolvent company would be a Pyrrhic victory. What matters here is the truth. It can hopefully caution others.

We still have quite a bit left to cover. We’re going to cite practical examples of stuff being done to the detriment of privacy and security of staff, not to mention clients. Free software is a pragmatic choice, but when managers use proprietary software they go not ‘get’ that.