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?

‘Big Shot’ boss: You’re accused of doing nothing. You committed an act of “nothingness”. Merry Xmas, Rianne!

Summary: A manager at Sirius ‘Open Source’ has accused my wife, Rianne, of basically nothing at all! She did nothing, hence she’s considered “guilty”; she resigned following this unwarranted bollocking, seeing that the company had gone broke and hid its presence in a network of shells, impeding potential lawsuits for compensation; today we reveal the full chain of correspondence and offer related context

THE LIAR AT SIRIUS has not only picked on yours truly; he also picked on my wife. Presumably being married to me means that any accusation against myself is also equally applicable to her.

How does that work? It goes like this:

Even the letters to me get reproduced and are then being sent to her (with her name instead of mine) and the only connection the company was able to find is that she wanted to raise money for koalas amid very deadly wildfires in Australia. I re-post her blog post under my name (she has no account in Techrights) several years ago and this astoundingly becomes ‘evidence’ against her. Just wow!

Don’t believe me? Watch…

Accusation #1:

This is the Bytes Media site, not Techrights. Nothing suggests she runs Techrights. That she runs Tux Machines is nothing new; she has done this for nearly a decade already. This is not even surprising and the company’s own site — even at this very moment — boasts about it:

Accusation #2:

Notice the author on the right; this was posted originally in Tux Machines (by Rianne), then merely copied by me.

Accusation #3:

This is about editorial work in Tux Machines, not Techrights. It’s worth noting that he even stalked the old (now retired) site of Tux Machines to ‘prove’ a connection — a fact that the company boasts about in its very own site! Even right now! They’ve failed to removed our names from the site even more than a month after we had resigned. Maybe they worry clients would find out things had gone really sour at the company.

Accusation #4:

They failed at basic reading comprehension if they think a blog post in Tux Machines implies Rianne does write Techrights. What is the above even meant to imply???

We’re astounded the company wasted not just time but also physical paper sending us (by post) the above, as if to make some point (the lawyer thought the same upon seeing this). We’ll come back to this later when we cover this travesty some more. It is a cautionary tale to anyone else who gets bullied by bosses, based on nothing at all! It cannot be overstated (nor understated) that she did nothing at all. Nothing!

Over a day ago (we saw this hours after it had been posted) Major Hayden wrote about “red flags” (Major Hayden is a sysadmin who worked in a number of well known companies). He said a couple of days ago: “Survival in almost any company requires you to believe that your contributions create value for someone somewhere. You also need a belief that your chance for further opportunities in the company should improve as the product improves. [...] When red flags start to appear, talk to your manager about them as soon as possible! Don?t let them fester and get worse while you?re silently becoming more and more upset and stressed. Try to bring them up with your manager in the context of your experience with them.”

It seems like a common issue; Hayden worries that the company where he worked started lying to clients (or, as he puts it more politely, wasn’t honest with clients). Such pathological liars or gaslighters or bullies are drowning the boat that all of us are in. In this particular case we deal with a sociopath who has no time to read my E-mail but has several weeks to carefully read years’ worth of IRC logs in my site, my wife’s site, and my wife’s old (now retired) site! Some productivity right there…

Amazing, keep up the great work, Mr. CEO! Unless you’re the only person left in ‘your’ company (he hasn’t been in the company as long as we have; he’s fairly new).

The “big shot” Mr. CEO fails to grasp that the company brought the criticism upon itself by mistreating staff for years, then lying to them and about them. As the Internet meme goes, “you must be new here,” Mr. CEO! Let us tell you a little about the company’s history. The staff can teach you a thing or two.

This is a CEO who has no clue how to manage the Wiki and we need to lecture him, explaining to him that as manager he is the one responsible for adding clients to the Wiki (after a couple of years as CEO he still did not know that!).

Anyway, amid all this self-defeating campaign against my wife came this letter that was folded to save money and still belongs right in the wastebasket. Yes, he didn’t even want to pay for a proper envelope. Must be a budget issue…

Now it’s our turn to show and to explain what a pathetic and likely illegal thing he embarked on. So we decided to take screenshots in December or even do some videos (e.g. show in OBS/Webcamoid just how ridiculous this entire thing was). There’s lots more on the way…

At the end of the day the company left itself bruised badly by bullying staff for years. It made some previously-ambitious and motivated staff less loyal or even disloyal.

Outsourcing is what’s left of the company now (it’s a middleman, reseller, parasitic firm that’s severely hobbled and unable to contribute). There are almost no geeks with technical skills left, just mostly self-appointed ‘managers’ who don’t do their own job, just pocket the money or surplus off of geeks, some of whom work all night long on shoestring budget. It’s an exploitative relationship; the managers are milking the brand (productive past staff earned reputation like this!) and the remaining staff — not to even surmount the abuse against staff since 2019, i.e. 4 years ago. We covered this before.

In the communications below one can see how it all started and later this month we shall talk about why it’s a kangaroo court, definitely not compliant with British laws. Aside from E-mails, the boss had her put on call; he recorded her (yes, audio and video) while she was baffled over what this thing was all about. She had no clue. Because she did nothing and hadn’t said anything.

It was certainly a waste of recording, but the E-mails that followed showed eagerness to harass and intimidate her. We’re dealing with a barely-trained manager pretending to be a cop, picking on a totally innocent person who has no clue what’s even going on or why.

Here is everything in chronological order and accompanying notes/explanations.

This is how it started:

Dear Rianne,

Could we please have a call urgently to discuss a matter that has been brought to my attention?

Would you be able to join a video call at this link? [redacted]

I will telephone you shortly to discuss timing.

Kind regards,
[redacted]

She wasn’t checking her personal E-mail account in real time, so then he phoned our personal landline at home (not the company’s phone! Perhaps that too was disabled/suspended already) to draw her attention to an E-mail having been sent. Upon logging in and checking Thunderbird she noticed her company account had been suspended (or at least dysfunctional).

She responded quickly regarding another such “weirdness”:

Hi [redacted],

I can’t login to [redacted] it says your account has been disabled.

Regards,

Rianne

Notice they failed to actually inform her and never said what had happened. They took action prematurely or shot before asking any questions. We’ll revisit this some other time and explain why it may be a breach of British law.

He responded (still by E-mail, they suspended everything, so they contacted her via personal E-mail):

Hi Rianne,

You don’t need to be logged in to Google to use that link. You can post that link into any browser window and join the meeting.

Could you please re-try?

Thanks,
[redacted]

She said:

I’m in.

He said:

Hi Rianne,

I can’t see you listed as a participant in the meeting attendees?

Let’s try a Zoom call instead.

Would you be able to join a Zoom meeting with the following details? :

This should again just work via any web browser.

To give you time to get it set up, can we please meet at 14:30?

Many thanks,
[redacted]

And she replied:

Hello [redacted],

Ok, I’ll see you at 14:30.

Best,

Rianne

After the call, which revealed absolutely nothing at all, he had the audacity to say “you are formally suspended” without even specifying anything that she had done wrong!

Here’s the E-mail:

Dear Rianne,

Further to our meeting by video conference earlier today, please see attached letter confirming our discussion that you are formally suspended from your role of Support Engineer with Sirius Open Source.

The attached letter provides further information about this action.

Kind regards,
[redacted]

This above-mentioned “letter” provided no evidence at all.

She responded after a couple of visits to lawyers.

Hi,

I believe I was unfairly treated on several grounds, including relevant protocols.

Here is the gist of the issues:

1. no due process
2. no evidence presented (or claims merely alluded to without context/link)
3. guilt by association (almost identical letter, too)

Roy and I visited lawyers on Friday and on Monday. We spoke about the facts in length.

We don’t yet wish to escalate this matter and would rather settle amicably.

Rianne

He did not even respond to this E-mail. He just simply ignored anything that did not suit his twisted agenda.

Days later he wrote:

Dear Rianne,

Please see the attached letter regarding your attendance at an investigation meeting tomorrow.

Kind regards,

An “investigation” for nothing basically; they accuse another person and then try to engage in ‘guilt’ by association (the other person isn’t guilty of anything either).

Rianne responded, politely:

Hi,

Please be patient. My lawyer will respond to you soon. I will not attend any meetings prior to that.

Best,

Rianne

Well, if that wasn’t bad enough he then kept pushing “Reminders” by E-mails, despite having not received any input to the effect he wanted. He kept postponing each time the kangaroo ‘court’ was empty, as it was likely constructed in violation of the law.

Days later Rianne followed up:

Hi,

The meeting with the lawyer was today. The legal rights are now clearer. Cooperation with your instructions are now possible.

Best,

Rianne

Suddenly the company ‘discovers’ they left something out:

Dear Rianne,

Thanks for your message.

As per our letter, you are entitled to be accompanied by either a work colleague or by a Trades Union representative.

Just to be clear, it is not Sirius’ responsibility to run or operate a Union. Trades Unions are independent bodies that operate separately to employers so that they can work for the benefit of their members.

It is also not Sirius’ responsibility to nominate a suitable Trades Union. It is a right under UK law for each employee to make an individual decision to choose whether or not they wish to join a Union. Sirius is an equal opportunity employer and makes no distinction at all between those who are members of a Trade Union and those who are not.

Kind regards,

That was not good enough:

Hi,

That does not answer my main question or my main point. The point is, you’ve presented me with a false dichotomy. That also does not follow the protocols, as per my lawyer.

Regards,

Rianne

In order to keep this post relatively concise we’ll come back to this at a later date when rights of staff are discussed further.

Some hours later, after seeking legal advice, she noted that she deserved (legally entitled) to be accompanied by someone else:

Hi,

My lawyers say I can be accompanied not only by a trade union person. Sirius doesn’t have a union.

Best,

Rianne

It was like talking to a wall because they did not facilitate what was allowed and in fact they had hidden those rights until she pointed those out (or after Mr. Boss was belately speaking to a professional at the company’s side). They kept pushing and pushing for another meeting:

Dear Rianne,

Thank you for your reply.

Please see the attached letter regarding your attendance at a re-scheduled investigation meeting.

Kind regards,

They even pushed this until December:

Dear Rianne,

Please see the attached letter regarding attendance at a disciplinary hearing this Friday 2nd December.

Kind regards,

Many “Reminders” followed, but still no compliance with rules. The company wasn’t interested in actual facts, laws etc.

Rianne gave up at this point, seeing the company wasn’t interested in any input about law and protocols. She resigned in December:

Dear [redacted],

I am writing to announce my resignation as a support engineer in Sirius Open source Ltd. effective today, 2nd of December 2022. This was not an easy decision to make; I have been working with Sirius for nine years, but it feels like this has come to an end. The situation recently hasn’t been managed/handled according to laws; this hassle could have been avoided if only the rules and protocols have been followed.

Sincerely,

Rianne

It took the company nearly 10 days to reply to that.

Dear Rianne,

Please see attached letter regarding your resignation.

Yours sincerely,

This was covered here before, as the contents of the letter were truly absurd.

To summarise, Rianne and I wished to send a formal document to the employer as a response to trumped-up accusations. We knew it would help if legal representatives (like someone in his/her capacity as a lawyer) could acknowledge that this is our position and that they’re there to take the matters further upon instruction from the clients. Not to endorse the message (statement) but to assure the company that the clients have legal representatives and are presently considering further action, such as lawsuit or whistle-blowing. At the end we chose the latter, seeing the companies was acting like an eel, hiding behind rocks and shells, especially weeks before the bullying began. The company changed its address 3 times in just 5 weeks, leaving both ‘companies’ with the address of its accountants, i.e. a phony registration (even if technically it’s legal to do so).

We assume that most readers don’t bother reading the PDF, as it is long, but it might help to have this series at the site (blog posts or wiki) at all times; it might help other people in case — or at the time — of similar incidents. Ever since we resigned we spotted at least 4 blog posts in the FOSS-centric blogosphere that we felt were inspired by us (but could not actually prove the correlation). Geeks like to focus on coding, testing, tickering etc. Sadly this means not many are aware of their legal rights and this leaves them vulnerable to sociopaths who somehow made their way into management positions in companies whose products/services they don’t even understand. Heck, they do not and cannot understand the staff either! Maybe that counts as management, but that’s not actual leadership and it usually ends badly as both clients and staff get fed up with the lies, the threats, the endless (false, baseless etc.) finger-pointing, and mostly cover-up. Charlatans and imposters are toxic to companies where the atmosphere or the work climate can rapidly deteriorate, causing colleagues to leave and creating critical vacuums (e.g. systems nobody can maintain or knows how to patch, extend etc.), begetting unpaid pensions, a lack of payslips (violation of British law by the way!), no actual servers and so on.

For those who want to get a quick roundup of the wrongs and the injustices done to my wife, here is the gist of the issues:

1. no due process
2. no evidence presented (or claims merely alluded to without context/link)
3. gross accusation inflation
4. guilt by association (identical letter, too)
5. the company has a history doing this to couples, e.g. one blind colleague based in Germany; it was very serious and it went to court (cost the company or its Directors — a manager and the CEO — a lot of money, went on for a long time, settled at the end)

Portions of E-mail correspondence prior to the abuse and resignation is now included here along with further context that anyone can judge independently. Attachment of an employee handbook (may not be very similar to the latest version) isn’t possible for confidentiality reasons and PDF versions of the letters sent will likely be shown in the next post, albeit only on camera. Employment contracts (printed for us, to be brought home) don’t say much at all, so staff was basically compelled to sign some “Web pages” online, consenting to largely unknown terms. Later on in this series we’ll show he we were pressured to sign new contracts ‘by surprise’ without any legal advice available.

In Rianne’s own words: “I think my employer does not wish to settle amicably, and it seems to boil down to a manager’s ego rather than anything wrong I did.”

Unless this was a case of digital “swatting” (someone who hates us trying to falsely report us to the employer, possibly anonymously), this is the employer manufacturing a ‘case’.

The cheaply-made hatchet job never goes far. It only backfires. The victims always remember.