‘ve just retrieved today’s new data release from ONS, showing that deaths for the latest week on record (in England and Wales) are about 10% higher than what they were before COVID-19. Is the pandemic over? Also, have we ruined people’s health? Many young adults are dying at alarming rates. It’s not about elderly people.

2019:

2013:

Also see Excess deaths, lack of debate

Older (not by a lot): European excess deaths

Partners in crime

Summary: The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ are a subject we’ll likely cover for a long time to come (probably next year too) because they unearth a bunch of other scandals, both at home and abroad

THE place where I worked for nearly 12 years (I resigned this past December) and where my wife worked for over 9 years (she too resigned) is a bonfire or a dumpster fire at the moment.

We have a lot of things left to say, but we intentionally throttle it all down to about once a week (maximum effect and modest progress when there’s no rush or hurry). There’s a lot of new material in the pipeline already and the goals are specified clearly.

“These aren’t audited because of the size of the business, but an audit can be demanded.”Some time around 26/7/2023 (ish) there will be a financial disclosure here (obligatory) and maybe there too. It was July 26^th last year (usually late July). These aren’t audited because of the size of the business, but an audit can be demanded.

We’ve meanwhile been contacted by one of the criminals, who is trying to induce guilt for seeking law enforcement, i.e. possible jail time for the perpetrators. Guilt-tripping like this isn’t a novel method; others tried it on us before. The main perpetrator, with his wife as an accomplice^*, will be chased until justice is done. They were victimising my colleagues and I, both men and women, for over half a decade. We didn’t find out until this year.

Apropos, in today’s Daily Links we included this new post entitled “Enabling financial crime”. To quote:

This will, directly, make financial crime easier in the UK. Here is an example of how it will do so. Under the laws about money laundering, there is an offence called ‘tipping off’ which is exactly what it sounds like: if you tell someone that you suspect of laundering money about your suspicions then you are tipping them off and this is, not surprisingly, illegal as it would allow them to take appropriate action to avoid being caught. In particular in this official document is this description: [...]

To be clear, none of us (the engineers, the GNU/Linux sysadmins and programmers) was aware of the crimes. We were the victims. It took 3 months of persistent pushing and relentless phonecalls (expensive) to finally get the pension providers to acknowledge fraud had taken place. A full investigation by police and courts is in order. The main perpetrator still has years before retirement (burning the debt and starting afresh would be absurd) and the wife was born the same year as me. She knew what went on, not only as a spouse but also as the sole Director other than her husband. Unlike the (ex-)husband, she did not flee to Bill Gates’ home state after signing a non-disclosure agreement.
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^* There are two little girls too; they’re probably not too happy about their dad running away like he did after his first marriage, leaving his two other girls to rot to the point where, according to what he told me in person, they’d not even speak to him. The two young girls were living like millionaires using the money their parents stole from workers. Now they’re probably living like poor kids, judging by today’s trends.

Business crimes aside, there is also moral depravity. We recently learned that after two messy and ugly break-ups (divorces) he’s already “working” on his next victim/s. Maybe make a fifth and sixth girl? Watch out, girl. He ruined the lives of at least 6 women already. The second wife asked my wife and I not to even mention to the third and fourth daughters that there was a first wife and two other daughters. What a mess. How long can you lie to a small child? “Mommy, is daddy a criminal? Why are we so poor all of a sudden? Why is daddy in another country?”

F the pandemic is over and we can give up on distancing and masking, then how come so many more people die (than before the pandemic)? For my age group (ages 15-44) in England and Wales, 7,455 deaths were registered in 2019 H1 (January-June), compred to 8,709 deaths in 2023 H1. That’s a 17% increase in deaths in just 4 years.

How come?

The deaths of under ones in 2019 H1: 1252. 2023 H1: 1281. For ages 1-14 it’s 512 deaths in 2019 H1, 505 deaths in 2023 H1. So they did not really suffer as much. It’s widely known that COVID-19 has little effect on young people. here are the complete numbers.

Age under 1: 1281
01-04: 197
05-09: 116
10-14: 192
15-19: 484
20-24: 644
25-29: 901
30-34: 1455
35-39: 2187
40-44: 3038

Summary: One last note on the issue of Greater London Authority (London Municipality); even though forms exist to report security breaches or incidents of data breaches, Greater London Authority never seems to have bothered with this; the culmination of this in the media (a scandal which puts at risk victims of sex crimes) overlooks a history of repeat/recurring incidents

As far as I’m aware, this was never reported (to those impacted) except internally.

GLA staff (it wasn’t the first such issue, nor the last):

So what good are such forms?

Data breaches’ handling policies/stance of GLA were not followed when I was there. Here they are in their own words:

Meanwhile in the news:

Also this past weekend:

Summary: This past weekend Greater London Authority’s managers came under fire for mishandling of data (this went on for months!) and it wasn’t even the first time; usually they keep quiet about such things and hope nobody will notice while IT people — including Sirius ‘Open Source’ — are retroactively ‘fixing’ these issues

think it’s fair to say many people dropped their gym-going habits after COVID-19 had erupted and lockdowns began, either for health reasons, financial reasons, or the gyms simply shutting down (many did). Almost exactly two years ago The Resonance Centre opened not far from us, so we went to have a look at it turned out they not only do yoga classes but a whole bunch of other things. They’re also promoting veganism.

Their Web site is under-developed at the moment, so I thought I’d drop a plug and prematurely an endorsement of sorts. The Resonance Center is near to Manchester City Stadium, just a short (about 10-minute) stroll along the lovely canal. The staff there is very friendly.

Here’s how to get there from Manchester City Stadium without all the traffic.

Summary: Data security and system security at Greater London Authority’s Web site haven’t been good; today we share just a couple of examples which help refute statements issued by Greater London Authority after a scandal that had made it to the mainstream media

Y! It really takes a liar to progress to management. The better the liar, the higher up the role.

As I mentioned the other day, there’s somewhat of a blunder since Friday when the news broke:

The following conspicuous statement is worth assessing, as I was working on the sites (various aspects, some microsites too) for 9 years.

You would expect them to say that, wouldn’t you?

As I said on Saturday morning, this has deja vu written all over it.

to give one example (there are more):

It wasn’t Sirius stuff (and certainly wasn’t me) who configured those terribly buggy forms.

As lying bosses at Sirius might say, “it doesn’t look good…”

It’s not the fault of Sirius either, at least not in this case.

The worst part of it is, as far as I’m aware GLA never publicly reported or disclosed this incident (sometimes this is legally required upon discovery or within a number of days, including informing those potentially affected, like people with their identity cards uploaded and widely available to the general public).

This isn’t the only such example.

2 years later even malicious scripts/programs could be uploaded. It was only detected after it had happened. Here are some fragments of old messages:

This is a penalty for not scanning/sanitising uploads/input.

Why am I publishing these (redacted sensibly)? Because lying is wrong and privacy problems are the problem, speaking about them is not the problem. It is the moral thing to do — to point out it is a repeat offender so to speak. There is an obligation here to debunk false assurances, as this has gone on for years already.