Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ management was dumb enough to replace the in-house infrastructure with overpriced (and outsourced) junk that did not even work as expected

THE report we deposited over a month ago already covered the fiasco of outsourcing (gradual) where I had worked for nearly 12 years. We don’t want to repeat what was already covered. I discussed this in person with the main individual responsible for the awful decision. He said they envisioned it would save money, but based on bills that I saw it was beyond insane to suggest so! Why would any sane company throw about 10,000 pounds down the drain every year? A modest second-hand server can be purchased for just 1,000 pounds and we didn’t need to buy any. We already had servers!!! We had an ISP, too.

When the company’s “cloud” (or “clown”) bills keep blowing upwards (upward to almost a thousand pounds a month), for something that started very small (the vendor lock-in relies on this sort of illusion, before exit barriers are raised), you have to wonder about the judgment of short-sighted decision-makers like Mr Kink. Who’s going to be held accountable? Or when?

As a reminder, AWS operated at a loss for years and Azure still seems to be operating at a loss (they just call everything “Azure” now). They are enticing people to enter the trap. Microsoft loses money and so does Google. Billions in losses! I brought this up over the phone, speaking to the CEO for about an hour almost a year ago! But they don’t want to listen!

As a reminder, Microsoft is laying off staff, cancelling and shutting down datacentres, as they overprovisioned for something that never came (or resulted in massive losses). Microsoft basically misleads shareholders by rebranding many things “cloud” and/or “Azure”, so even if it’s not growing Microsoft can claim otherwise. There’s no proper definition of “cloud” or “Azure”.

On the phone about a year ago I suggested small self-hosted machines (the CEO called this “hobbyist”). It’s worth reminding ourselves that we lost staff that looked after our servers. That too was the fault of the management, for reasons we explained before.

It would be so much cheaper and safer to run our own infrastructure, as we already did for decades. And yes, we covered this in the report and earlier in this series. This is a no-brainer.

To give one example of what moving to AWS caused Sirius: OTRS, a ticketing system, needed us throwing more and more resources at it (partly because of bad design, partly due to workers sending megabytes of text in E-mails, as they top-post — the “Microsoft Way” basically — and don’t bother trimming/snipping what they respond to). Each time you add resources the bills go up by a lot! That’s the “magic” of “the clown”! It’s getting very expensive very fast!

Remember that we used to self-host all the E-mail of the company; now the company uses phony encryption as a tenant on someone else’s servers (Amazon). I challenged my colleagues about this. I argued with management. They could not even defend their decision. They saw no need to defend what they had done! We’ve had arguments over this internally in 2022. Of course it was risky for me to bring this up, but at this stage it was the moral thing to do, even a moral obligation. At Sirius, colleagues felt like their efforts and contributions were ignored/discarded by the cabal (family), so they quit caring. This is how nepotism dooms companies. Some colleagues left, some remained but without much desire to go beyond the basics. And this aspect too we’ve covered here before.

Regarding E-mail hosting in “the clown”, here’s a 2020 story. To quote an Evening Shift handover: “Spent most of my evening tracking down missing emails. I was rather perturbed by xxxxx’s handover email disappearing and I’m guessing that because the server was underpowered it started to behave strangely and misclassified legitimate emails as viruses and deleted them. Fortunately each email is given an unique id by the system which is useful for searching the logs. Managed to get a list of deleted ones and sent it to xxxxx, xxxxx, and xxxxx suggesting that they identify their clients or ones they recognise and email them with the time + 1 hour asking to resend. I found one from xxxxx and emailed and xxxxx kindly sent his email again.”

Wonderful! What a mess.

“Ironically,” Ryan Farmer notes today, “”Cloud Hosting” only makes sense if your needs are so small that it’s hardly worth setting anything up yourself.”

In some cases useful virtual machines were turned off to “save money”. Even if they took little space and CPU. If self-hosted, they would cost almost nothing to leave on.

Clown computing is a trap. To quote one new (days-old) cautionary tale (already in Daily Links): “Turns out that Revue is getting shut down. This means that I won’t be able to use it anymore (and I stopped using it because it wasn’t getting much traction vs the amount of work I put into it).”

So maybe outsourcing isn’t such a wise long-term strategy after all.

At one point by far our biggest client relied on VMware for clown hosting; of course VMware shut the whole thing down and in a hurry we needed to get all the servers out of there. Clown computing: it’s here today, but gone tomorrow. You’re not part of the decision! It does not matter if you have critical services on there and they give you a very short notice (to vacate).

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.

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.

Video download link | md5sum 167f4206cc0f8c61665c361b14b015f3
Chronology of Botched Sirius Hatchet Job
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Having lost any real understanding of Free software, my former employer also lacks understanding of free speech; somehow conversations that I was having with a friend online (not mentioning the company or staff) are spun as ‘evidence’ that my wife did something wrong and this backfired on the company; it also shocked our lawyers that the company was dumb enough to do this

TODAY’S video is a little different and it was recorded without prior preparation (nor post-recording edits) in OBS Studio, which has just had a major new release.

Viewers can now see one of the letters we’ve received from the ‘UK’ CEO of Sirius ‘Open Source’ (probably sent from his home, as the company no longer has an office). Scare quotes around ‘UK’ because the company now pretends to be American (despite having almost no American staff) and around ‘Open Source’ because the company rapidly abandons its Open Source roots. Shown above is the phone used in conjunction with Asterisk, which is Free (or Open Source) software. This phone won’t be of use anymore due to lots of outsourcing of what’s left of the company.

Also shown in the video is the controversial koala which became a theme here (this post offers some context), a photo of us in a post-wedding party, and other stuff that the stalker (‘UK’ CEO of Sirius ‘Open Source’) was collecting for weeks in an effort to frame innocent people. What is that all about? Is he trying to show that he found something that does not exist? Sirius knows these two people run Tux Machines, and Sirius even exploits that to market itself. In IRC, Sirius was never mentioned! Not by name.

The video above hopefully helps explain the absurdity of this whole situation. It shows example pages with IRC logs in them, falsely asserting those have something to do with my wife (she is not even in IRC, it’s just me and a friend). In the later parts the latest article and meme are shown and explained in passing. It’s better to just read them, the video tries not to repeat what’s already in them.

Summary: The ‘UK’ manager at Sirius ‘Open Source’ decided to start stalking an innocent worker, trying really hard to somehow associate her with things she wasn’t involved in (probably to avoid paying compensation as the company was rapidly collapsing)

THE past two parts explained how the company communicated with myself and with my wife, basically taking extreme action before even bothering to contact us.

Then, the company was writing the same letters to both of us (both to Roy and to Rianne, albeit separately) like it’s the same person, sometimes forgetting to even change the names in the letters, which contained totally irrelevant paragraphs. Lazy management. Lousy skills. They didn’t even bother distinguishing! We’re not talking about legally-valid letters here; those weren’t based on law but a bunch of gobbledegook with endless reuse or copy-paste of stuff, not even offering much original content and just following mindless and legally-inapplicable portions. We’ve already shown some parts while hiding more personal parts. The company did not bother truly customising the letters and, as noted here before, forgot to change the names sometimes! How awful! No wonder the company keeps losing clients!! Quality has fallen sharply.

What we’re dealing with here is a very cheaply-made and very poorly-executed hatchet job.

There was no need to produce any letters. On the surface one can see they just want to extrajudicially attack staff. No need to print any letters either as that would waste paper. Not good for the environment… the company likes to pretend to be green by not printing things… while the CEO drives around in a car that’s like 4 times bigger than what’s needed. In more recent years one got the impression he can no longer afford even a shirt!

In an upcoming video we plan to show Rianne’s letter. We’ll show it’s folded (because the CEO does not have a suitable envelope or cannot afford one). Maybe he chose to fold everything to save envelope money (stamps) given that Roy’s letters weren’t folded.

The weirdest thing is, the CEO was becoming rather creepy and spooky, spying on us and especially on Rianne, taking screenshots of her photographs like a scene from Jeepers Creepers. No return address on the envelopes; maybe he lives in some lair/cave somewhere.

The writing style is also quite primitive. He used proprietary software (Google) and pasted (pushed through) screenshots of text into that. Any moron knows that the way to process a PDF is, copy text, don’t make screenshots of text! It’s like a newbie authored the letter/s, so in the evidence (so-called ‘evidence’) is a bunch of screenshots with remarks that mostly take out of context what’s in the screenshots. Those screenshots show stuff like an informal chat about us depositing coins (change) in the bank. How on Earth is that even of relevance? Is he trying to mock people who use physical currency instead of Apple stuff?

Speaking of Apple stuff, we don’t suppose he wants the Cisco IP phone (they recently decided to replace all of them with proprietary spyware anyway), so we don’t know whether to toss it in the bin or find a way to recycle it. It’s too large for any envelope currently in our home and we don’t know where to send it. Mr. Big Shot Boss, send us a clue. Is it too “old” and “hobbyist” for you to accept? It’s not Apple and it’s not “clown computing”, so we’re left to assume it’s “obsolete”. That’s the way you think anyway. Never mind if this phone was always far more reliable than the “clown computing” garbage you brought to the company and insisted on even after it had failed all the workers; again and again and again…

The letters contain totally irrelevant text and some facts you don’t like to hear about the company you claim to lead. You’ve mostly oppressed this past year. That’s no true leadership.

So what to do with those letters you mailed us? Should they be treated like pathetic love letters from a long-lost boyfriend, who maintains an unhealthy obsession? Should we tear it all and throw it in the trash can? It’s small enough to fit in the bin, but maybe it’s better to keep that as a souvenir. You have been wasting paper, time, and toner, reinforcing the idea or the perception you don’t know how to run a company. You were introduced to us as a person who had created a successful company, but public records show just a one-man company or a defunct two-person company (dissolved a decade ago). So either we’re blind to some very big company that doesn’t bother mentioning you or we’re dealing with a pathological liar who relishes in high self-esteem.

We can’t help wondering why the CEO felt a need to send a physical copy of his letters. Maybe because that’s a culmination of several weeks of him stalking people. Those letters are like ‘trophies’ to him, even if about 90% of them are mindless screenshots of his proprietary Web browser (he’s like some very dumb uncle who includes the whole browser in the screenshot instead of just framing the contents of the page). Well, perhaps we should be thankful for these physical (hard) copies because a) we don’t need to print it ourselves; we can bring it to lawyers easily. b) I have something for my recording (to show in the upcoming video). Cheers!

Anyway, there was no need to send it, I have all the logs and can access things with full context, unlike some lousy screenshots that lack a corresponding URL. Did you ever think any labour tribunal would deem a two-person chat (or screenshot thereof) admissible? Maybe that’s rather revealing; the company is now run by rookies.

Video download link | md5sum e7d0e62fcd938f1c783acdc8e9ff6afa
Picking on Innocent Workers
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Today we focus on what Sirius ‘Open Source’ ‘Inc.’ (shell company) did to my wife this past November; it wasn’t just irrational but suicidal (if the company could still be taken to court; it’s trying to dodge the law at this point)

THE ‘UK’ CEO of Sirius ‘Open Source’ (it’s a UK-based company, it only pretends to be American!) has aggravated/upset staff and now he’s in a bit of a panic, trying to silence those whom he mercilessly hurt with false accusations and accusation inflation, basically looking to cover up misconduct and lying by simply shooting the messenger (who had spoken about this internally for years before doing anything else, however subtle).

“What sane person would go ahead with such a witch-hunt?”The series is getting longer and longer because the tail of scandals stretches further and further, almost as fast as we deplete what we have. We’re receiving additional information, which helps explain what exactly happened earlier this winter. The company wants to pretend everything is normal, but in reality this is a total catastrophe.

The video above is commentary about the latest 3 memes and article. What makes it exceptional is the low quality of the accusation against my wife, Rianne. What sane person would go ahead with such a witch-hunt?

Shooting first, asking questions later? Sirius UK or Sirius Ukraine?