Summary: Contractors may seem glowingly popular at the Linux Foundation; but what does contracting mean for corporate liability?

WHEN this series started 6 months ago we promised not to name clients, even though most of them are listed and shown publicly in the company’s official Web site.

Seeing that the British authorities (or “Crown”) are unwilling to hold Sirius accountable for pension fraud, we thought it would be worth showing what’s already public anyway. Here are some government clients of Sirius:

All the above is public anyway. And I’ve blurred out anything that’s not a public institution. Another page:

There are many more that the company does not publicly name, including Parliamentary Ombudsman, Home Office, and more recently Acas (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service). There are several more that are named, e.g. Bristol City Council. Some are omitted from the carousel, but appear in another page because almost nobody is left in the company who knows how to properly maintain its Drupal Web site e.g. myself or the Support Manager. Everyone is rapidly leaving and the replacement rate is near 0-to-1.

If we are going to expose our regime too, seeing that it does not want to look into very obvious evidence of fraud, it helps to provide evidence of the company’s ties to the government. It is very much possible that later this month it will implicate London’s municipality because it’s directly connected to the cops who aren’t investigating the matter and won’t even look into reports of crime. We don’t think it’s a coincidence. They probably just don’t that would be fun! Do they really want to participate in a blunder that embarrasses their sponsor? It’s not just any municipality; I worked on their systems for ages and I also have lots to prove just how much I worked for them while my boss defrauded me and my colleagues.

Stay tuned. We have lots left to show. Sans a D-Notice, maybe this will even hit the mainstream media.

“Hi, I have read your blog on Sirius. Do you have any time to discuss further?”

–Anonymised message, earlier this month

Summary: Six months ago Sirius ‘Open Source’ had the audacity to tell people whom it robbed that they need to “cool off” (no such obligation); imagine a rapist telling the victim to just “chill”; today we revisit the matter

THE departure from Sirius half a year ago was long overdue. The company had done a number of bad things other than the pension fraud (which we didn’t know about at the time; there were mere suspicions). At one point I even considered leaving abruptly, seeing how colleagues were being treated/mistreated. One of them got diarrhea from the stress. He was routinely and casually bullied by fake ‘managers’. I had enumerated clients I was not happy about and discussed it privately with friends. It’s my legal right. I can talk about work (though this was not at all mentioned internally; I had kept these 100% to myself and only Rianne knows the full reasons for disdain because she worked in the same company).

Where does one even start describing what went on in the company? First there’s Bill Gates: notorious, corrupt, working in the shadows and perhaps passing a bribe? I never ever had any contact with that (perhaps LDAP) project, but that still reeks/stinks a lot. Why was there an NDA and why would an American approach a British company? The one that employs a Gates critics who is pursing police files about Gates at the time. It’s not like Microsoft did not already try this. It tried contacting the same company, explicitly complaining about me. Some other day I’ll elaborate some more on that. It’s another kind of bullying.

Then we had this public sector client that was also connected to Microsoft; well, they moved from Windows to GNU/Linux but stayed on Azure; thankfully I never even logged in to that crap (but one day they MIGHT ask me, or so I worried, and then what?). For another client there was an Amazon/AWS migration planned (used to be a domestic company doing the hosting); more AWS is not the ‘skill’ we want to develop, is it? By 2022 there 3 more “problematic” clients: some Army-connected thing (US), a loan shark, a company that employs criminals and us acting as secretaries of theirs, picking up fault reports, not even solving them. What was happening to Sirius? As I noted the day I left the company, at one point that year I was even asked to look at server logs for an anti-abortion group. Was the twice-divorced CEO becoming a misogynist, too?

The irony is that the CEO kept bragging about me working for the company, using that to recruit people (those people told me that). And after he defrauded me and my colleagues (some of them friends) he had the audacity to assert the victims were in fact the problem.

It’s hard to believe it has been this long, but it took about 3 months just to get to the bottom of the pension fraud (with Standard Life openly admitting it in writing). Sure, it’s bad publicity for them if it drags on for months and months, but that’s not the point. It’s just a really slow process and the Sirius scandal will deepen. It will expose and implicate the state, too. Just because Sirius was a contractor and state agencies were “clients” doesn’t mean that the state had no responsibilities and obligations. We suppose this is becoming an epic liability scandal and that’s why they keep so quiet about it. They hope the victims will just forget about it or “move on” out of sheer desperation.

We have a lot left to say; if it were not for source protection, it would boil over completely by now (but possibly burn some innocent people). We’ve heard from journalists, ex staff, applicants, clients… they’re really unhappy about what’s happening in Sirius right now. And just wait, there’s lots more to come.

Video download link | md5sum f4f239686d76f30d562cc44bb70cb997
Serious Scandal by Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: What started as fraud committed by one company (since 2011 if not earlier) is becoming a blunder and major embarrassment to high-profile clients that are government agencies, in effect employing programmers and system administrators via a contractor that grossly underpays workers while secretly defrauding them (stealing money from them)

THE previous part spoke of the brain drain that had reduced Sirius ‘Open Source’ to almost nothing; even before pension fraud was exposed (we broke the story here this past spring) the company had almost nothing left in terms of physical assets, monetary assets, human resources, and clients. It’s just milking what’s left of contracts signed or renewed last year.

The really obnoxious thing is the two-faceted ‘coverup’ (to use the term loosely) by entities that should know better and should do better. If the British authorities are so desperate to save face and spare themselves negative publicity, then they should hurry up and act, showing strength of law, accountability, and drastic consequences. Instead, based on the lack of interaction (also my Member of Parliament is being ignored), it certainly seems like this scandal will just deepen, implicating a growing network of facilitators and enablers. This scandal isn’t about just Sirius anymore; Sirius received millions of pounds from the British government and the government oughtn’t look the other way when people who worked on government computer systems become victims of employment crimes and embezzlement or just plain old fraud.

Summary: Today’s part talks about what’s left of Sirius ‘Open Source’; about two thirds of the people listed in the “Meet The Team” page of Sirius ‘Open Source’ aren’t there (some left years ago), the company is unable to recruit, and LinkedIn is linking the company to people who don’t work (or barely ever work) for Sirius ‘Open Source’

THE pension fraud at Sirius ‘Open Source’ is still being ignored by Action Fraud. This won’t end well because Sirius ‘Open Source’ is connected to Action Fraud through its likely biggest client (if it’s still a client at all). Are they waiting for the company to simply vanish as a legal entity with the word “LIMITED” added to its name, leaving the culprits off the hook? Because it would contribute to the perception that the police becomes an actual facilitator of the crime, for self-serving purposes at least.

We’ve meanwhile noticed that Sirius ‘Open Source’ makes itself look bigger than it really is. Here’s an example:

Sirius ‘Open Source’ has maybe paid him for hundreds of hours of contract work over the past decade. That’s a few dozens of hours per year. Don’t be fooled by Microsoft’s LinkedIn. It helps companies, not just people, craft a fictional image/perception of themselves.

Video download link | md5sum 0cf753fb90aab5992efe0bfd625e24fb
Political Escalation
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Today’s video mostly covers part 3 of the series while stressing the relevance to Free software and the British government; Sirius ‘Open Source’ did play a big role in adoption of Free software in the UK, so its crimes against staff (that worked on government computer systems) matter a lot, except the British police prefers to overlook this matter

THE pension fraud at Sirius was a serious crimes and the perpetrators of the crime have not been punished yet. For context, this is a company that once upon a time sponsored the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for several consecutive years and wasn’t reluctant to put GNU logos in its Web site.

Things soured over the years. A decade ago I went to a meeting which helped secure a very important deal for the company. I’d rather not name the client, but let’s just say it supervises (or is in charge of) the people who run Action Fraud — basically the very same folks who turned down my report of a crime, a crime committed not only against myself. This is confirmed, it’s not merely a suspicion.

Action Fraud, what about action? Where’s Action Fraud?

Are they trying to hide something?

It has been three weeks already and they’re not even responding to my elected representative, who (to her credit!) seems eager to get to the bottom of it.

The video above is a verbal update on the issue. We still have a lot of material left to publish and many steps remaining to explore, bodies to escalate to, issues to scrutinise etc. This cannot possibly end well unless the perpetrators are held accountable. All of them. Facilitators are another matter as they’re only indirectly culpable. ?

‘ve just gotten the latest numbers from ONS. About 10 minutes ago ONS released Week 22 numbers for 2023 (15 minutes ago an updated file wasn’t there yet).

Notice how this year compares to last year or prior years. 29.5% higher.

Back to work, folks Pandemic is over, according to WHO.

Today in Gemini:

So, some quick advice: Don’t get COVID.

I went back to Seattle in the beginning of March, wore a mask the whole time (my partner did not. I think this is important). We got to drop in on Emerald City Comic Con, which was well missed, and I was so happy to be there, and also just walk around the city again. I miss walking around cities.

My partner was sick by the time we were done at ECCC (they did wear a mask there, as we do for conventions). By the time we got home, I had cold-like symptoms. That Tuesday I was fully sick with it.

[...]

Anyway, three months out, I still have a little bit of a cough, and my brain fog has mostly cleared up. I truly believe it could have been so much worse, if I had not gotten vaccines.

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ scandals have opened a can of worms; why isn’t a government contractor being held accountable for crimes committed against its staff?

THE company that once upon a time sponsored the Free Software Foundation (FSF and KDE among other things) might cease to exist any day now. In the previous part (with video) of this mini-series we argued that, based on the hard evidence, Sirius loses staff and clients rapidly. There’s almost nobody to actually run what’s left of the company. If the company tries to recruit people, they lack the interest. We have evidence of this too.

Tomorrow morning we’ll release a video to explain how British police is failing to respond not only to reports of a crime but also messages from British MPs. This will lead to further escalations that generally embarrass the system and there’s room for suspicion that the “Establishment” (government) is using one hand to wash the other and in turn wash the face.

This series will hopefully coincide with breakthrough in the progress sense. As noted above, it’s relevant to Free software advocacy because what we have here is a former FSF sponsor basically robbing (defrauding) Free software advocates, who were exploited and subjected to “value extraction” for many years, grossly underpaid and moreover embezzled behind their backs with a pension that never existed.

We’ll hopefully be able to illuminate what’s happening behind the scenes by disclosure of some redacted communications.