Video download link | md5sum f385fee779a251d54417ae0c9fb5297b
A Company Valued at One Pound
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The company known as Sirius Corporation (founded 24+ years ago as company number 03633198) is not really operational and it is carrying debt^*; we seem to be dealing with a truly dodgy business here, albeit it goes by the name “Open Source” (which is a lie)

THE 27^th of December is treated like Boxing Day this year (due to Christmas happening or falling on a weekend), but Christmas Eve was 3 days ago — just 1 day after Sirius Corporation — the ‘parent’ of Sirius ‘Open Source’ — had filed the annual papers about the financial state (as of March of this year). Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been racking up a lot of debt and the same is true for Sirius Corporation, which is discussed in the video above. There is another shell, albeit it is based in the United States and it probably has its own debt crisis.

The way things stand at the moment, Sirius Corporation seems like a collection of shells. As noted above, we were pretty much forced (not literally at gunpoint but blackmailed using threats) to move to a newly-minted shell without any legal advice (before, during, or after the signing). We’ll revisit this subject later this month.
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^* We’ve made local copies of two PDFs [1, 2].

Jumping from one loan to the next [1, 2] (and one shell to another)

Summary: The company that I left this month is breaching several regulations and failing to follow the law; to make matters worse, pointing this out from within the company is impermissible and may very well instigate witch-hunts

THE HOLIDAYS are not over, but we’re still in a relatively quiet period of the year. People are resting. Nevertheless, we’re receiving additional information, which we plan to cover next month. As we shall show, under the guise of “manners” and the veneer of “professional” self-appointed enforcers are lying to people and lying about people. It is highly manipulative and it pits Sirius ‘Open Source’ in conflict with human rights, not just labour regulations and ethical codes.

Shown below is a portion of a month-old report (predating my resignation). It highlights the fact that the company where I worked for since early 2011 had gradually become more and more hostile towards its workers — to the point of false accusations and pathological lying.

Adherence to the Rule of Law and Human Rights

From what can be gathered thus far, the company is shooting from the hip, walking in the dark without any legal guidance. From what’s witnessed and what lawyers have made an assessment of, legal protocols are disregarded or simple breached; the managers don’t go through HR as they did before (impartial), probably due to cost-related overheads and a lack of budget/money in the company’s bank account, as can be seen by failure to comply with very basic legal protocols. Very, very basic stuff.

In a society based on the Rule of Law it is important to ensure, at all times, that laws are being followed, including the freedom of expression. A proper investigative process should be based on law-compliant guidelines rather than made up or twisted as one goes along, based on some personal preferences of a self-appointed investigator. Improvised ‘laws’ aren’t laws but kangaroo courts of theatrical nature with arbitrary routines.

Freedom of speech was in general respected, but only selectively (i.e. rules not equally and consistently applied). Inside work, for instance, some people were allowed to express political opinions, whereas others got reprimanded for making a harmless joke pertaining to Donald Trump (whom the company’s founder supports). Is it the case that some workers have the privilege to express political opinions, whereas some are denied that? Is kinship a recipe for immunity, not just a recruitment fast lane?

In the same vein, management can use very crude language at times, but even reasonably polite words used by ordinary staff are spun as “rude” and staff is forbidden from expressing opinions, based on false pretexts of “manners”.

Summary: The CEO of Sirius ‘Open Source’ should have been fired for fabricating and trumping up ‘cases’ against long-serving staff; instead, he was allowed to persist, disgracing an already-disgraced organisation which lies to its own staff and clients

A frame-up (frameup) — or fit-up as it’s called in the UK — best describes what Sirius resorted to amid its demise, seeing that it’s unable to pay staff the compensation that it deserved. Heck, it could barely pay its own bills!!! The company kept changing its addresses (3 times in one month!!!) until both entities, the original and the shell, got registered with the address of a different company. One might hypothesise this was done to suffocate litigation attempts, foreseeing that some staff would sue the company.

Sirius is, at this stage at least, operating like a sham entity if not a scam. Watch out. Moreover, Sirius tolerates no criticism of its behaviour, even if it’s expressed only internally or discussed outside the company without mentioning anybody (not even the company) for the purpose of professional advice.

When companies are entrusted to bullies who lie to bounce off criticism it’s probably time to leave. If they try to shield themselves from litigation, maybe it’s time to consider reporting the matter to the authorities.

The koala reference will be shown next month when we present the frameup and the bullying by Sirius management. It’s alluded to in text below, but we can also show this visually.

The text below is from a report we handed in (internally) when we were still in the company.

What we see here resembles witch-hunting and is more like stalking and misuse of management time, stalking staff outside work instead of pursing actual clients (management should focus on CEO tasks, not spying; that’s the job of HR or equivalent).

Roy and Rianne feel like Sirius is trying to cover up and target criticism instead of actually listening to long-serving staff, who spent years warning about several legal and technical issues (some examples hitherto provided in this document).

Rianne is probably the biggest victim here. After bullying by a former manager, who used false accusations against her, the latest CEO is picking photos of her and completely unrelated material, including shamelessly using a charitable cause (supporting koala bears when fires killed them) to cause trauma to those who support them — that’s akin to bullying of the worst kind. To make matters worse, only days earlier Rianne told the CEO that her aunt, the only relative she has in the UK, had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and may need holidays to be confirmed (as many had been turned down) so that she can visit and look after her in these difficult times (she has no family to look after her). It seems cruel and merciless for a CEO to pick on a worker who is grieving, stressed over the health of a loved one, and moreover throw adorable koala photos as “evidence” of a supposed ‘crime’ (basically leveraging the agony of animals to chase down a worker quite so ferociously). It’s not reassuring to think that management adopts the mindset of brutes and ogres, picking on staff looking to raise money for animal charities while themselves supporting blind people’s and animals’ charities (for many years already). While management dwells or relishes in offensive, crude language, even polite terms used by “ordinary” staff gets painted as “rude” if the message itself isn’t convenient to the management. There are documented examples of these double standards.

Roy will soon be (or have been) 12 years in the company, but he has already endured some abuse from colleagues, usually bosses. It should be reasonable to expect Roy to be unhappy about lack of response from bosses (sometimes lying about not receiving his E-mails). What sort of company acts this way? As noted above, other colleagues had the same experience (deafness and silence). It’s crystal clear, for several purely technical reasons, that messages from Roy were being ignored, not lost.

The official data for England only runs until the 19^th, so let’s compare apples to apples:

2022 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2022 1,296
18-12-2022 1,176
17-12-2022 799
16-12-2022 834
15-12-2022 1,064
14-12-2022 963
13-12-2022 1,026

2021 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2021 926
18-12-2021 735
17-12-2021 743
16-12-2021 777
15-12-2021 805
14-12-2021 815
13-12-2021 794

2020 hospitalisations per day with COVID-19

19-12-2020 1,812
18-12-2020 1,672
17-12-2020 1,873
16-12-2020 1,796
15-12-2020 1,730
14-12-2020 1,746
13-12-2020 1,581

Meanwhile ONS says that due to some unspecified technical error it cannot publish the latest death toll/tally (for December), which seems awfully strange. How hard can it be to just count death certificates? No classification or further certifications of them is required, just a running sum/total.

The official government propaganda will likely say the above are not hospitalised for coronavirus but for something else, but how is that any different from last year (wintertime)?

In spite of very scarce testing, 28.8% more COVID-19 positives were registered in the latest week compared to the prior week.

COVID-19 is still with us and it kills many people. The media must not ignore this.

Video download link | md5sum 6957f7427183bba6699ceab72cb318a0
No Lies Are Acceptable
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Is covering up and lying “a must”? Welcome to the ‘new’ Sirius, where lies become the norm

THE terrible shape that Sirius ‘Open Source’ has found itself in is a downward spiral caused largely by lying management; a bloated company with almost as many “managers” as workers (who actually do the job) is compelling people to not be honest with clients and to make matters worse the CEO starts lying to staff and also about staff. This is the downfall of Sirius; the true story of the company needs to be told and future victims ought to be cautioned upfront.

To be very clear, the company has a history dodging liability and facing litigation. One former employee or a pair of them sued the company. One of them asked me if the company was still “busy”, I can only assume because the two managers (then defendants) claimed to be broke and therefore unable to pay upon losing the case, which was costly (time and money). Generally speaking, here we are again and the company creates more shells, hoping to shuffle people between one shell and the next in order to ‘cancel’ the debt (insolvency) and start afresh. But with what name? And at what point will associates too come to grips with the sort of eel they’re dealing with?

We’ll give more concrete examples next month.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ compared Network Operation Centre (NOC) staff to “monkeys”; the company’s management refuses to talk to staff, resorts to pathological lying, and hopes to somehow maintain the illusion that it is still behaving “professionally”

THE series is getting longer as we go on and on. We’re continuing to accumulate and sometimes receive more explosive revelations, showing that the management of Sirius is not only lying to clients and to staff. It is a lot worse. Sirius makes stuff up. It’s also misrepresenting clients, attributing to them something they never said.

As we shall show next month, the so-called ‘CEO’ (a relatively new arrival) has the audacity to act like a Private Investigator when in fact fabricating and distorting allegations. There may be legal ramifications here, but the company started attacking the staff just two days after it had changed its official registered address to the address of the accountancy, which means it’s hard to serve legal papers to Sirius (i.e. suing the company).

Below we reproduce text from the report sent to the management 4 weeks ago (further context will be provided later as another major scandal unfolds):

Those who accuse Roy, and moreover lump his wife into it (more on that later), conveniently forget all the many positive things Roy wrote about Sirius in Techrights even years before working for the company. This is what’s shown publicly in blog posts, not some assorted chat gossip with a ton of typos.

None of this is about defamation (no falsehoods contained therein), it’s all about ego. It’s about egotistic people, whose names are never even mentioned, not knowing how to cope with constructive and factual criticism. As noted before, the company is deaf to its own staff. Technical people are treated as clueless. This is a recipe for corporate failure.

To be very clear, the company’s clients are never named in relation to the company but in relation to news (they are famous people, public figures). To claims that people with audience of millions cannot be even mentioned in Techrights is outright crazy.

In IRC, the main channel talks about technology, but the company instead cherry-picks some side channel that was deprecated back in 2010. In it, some real issues are discussed, potential misconduct by the company at many levels, even gross misconduct by the company and lies devised to cover up failure to comply with contracts (possible legal breach and actionable). But no person or company gets mentioned, except maybe by accident (very rarely). Roy insists that he did not name people or the companies; the PDFs supplied to Roy support that, as he was always careful. Roy is entitled to an opinion, especially outside work. He used reasonably polite wording.

To be very clear, the job in the overnight Support Team involves about 1 hour of practical work on actual servers (true for NOC colleagues; there’s nothing practical to do aside from response to incidents), the rest of time being devoted to tickets, monitoring, response, and discussion with colleagues. Roy did all of these things very well. Roy never posted to social media while on shift. Ever. That much is very evident.

To be very clear, the company defamed the NOC (Support Team) staff, comparing it to “monkeys” in the official wiki (before hiring those “monkeys”). Staff should not be compared to animals; it’s not fair to animals and it’s not fair to people. This is an example of unprofessional behaviour inside the company. Now the management is running after us “monkeys”. To wit, the company name-called Roy even in company E-mail (calling him “paranoid” in writing and over the telephone). This culture issue isn’t limited to staff. For instance, the company says bad things in Slack, worse than in IRC, and with identifiable names included (e.g. one manager of a client being called “an arse” by the Sirius founder). This is really bad, this is unprofessional, and this gets transmitted to a surveillance company (Salesforce) in another continent, working for clients like ICE. When one’s own chief (and founder) is name-calling the clients by their real name in a privacy-infringing tool, visible to all staff, why are high standards expected from low-paid, exploited, “milked” staff like Roy and Rianne, who already endured unwarranted abuse years prior?

It should be noted that low-quality “gossip” (two-person chat) — with quantity to make up for the low quality — don’t add up to a serious case of disciplinary action, especially against someone who never even spoke in that IRC network, never mind the channel.

Video download link | md5sum 6f9d4e69047e26d649a3053f33c4e035
Paying the Cost of Bad Management
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ status quo is shaken further by admissions from LastPass itself that it had suffered a major security breach, vindicating me after disputes with deeply misguided management, mesmerised by buzzwords and fashionable hype waves

UNDER the guise of “cost-savings” (which was a lie, no money was saved in the long run) Sirius was outsourcing almost everything, in effect replacing Free/libre software with proprietary software. The surveillance and security aspects are rearing their ugly head again and nobody wants to accept responsibility for it. Instead it’s all cover-up.

The video above covers about half a dozen blog posts — the very latest writings on the matter. We weren’t planning to do this on Christmas Eve, but LastPass intentionally waited until the holidays before delivering the bombshell. It hoped not many people would cover this and, in turn, not many people would become aware.