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.

New video:

Description:

Excess deaths, (2016 to 2019, and 2021)

In November 2022

47,611 deaths registered in England

4,083 deaths (9.4%) above the November five-year average

Coronavirus (COVID-19) (2.6% of all deaths)

W / E 23rd December (England and Wales

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/latest

Number of deaths was above the five-year average

Private homes
(37.5% above, 1,120 excess deaths)

Hospitals
(18.8% above, 1,031 excess deaths)

Care homes
(10.5% above; 282 excess deaths)

Other settings
(7.0% above, 61 excess deaths)

Zoe data

https://health-study.joinzoe.com

Prevalence, One in 21

ONS prevalence data

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19/latestinsights

4.52% in England (1 in 20 people)

5.70% in Wales (1 in 18 people)

6.43% in Northern Ireland (1 in 16 people)

4.05% in Scotland (1 in 25 people)

And the real numbers are likely even higher.

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.

Context: Data Contradiction Means Office for National Statistics (ONS) Began Shamelessly Lying About Number of Dead People

Also see (newer): Seems Like a Trend: British Government Messing With the Data to Defend COVID-19 Policies

New video:

Days ago:

Data Contradiction Means Office for National Statistics (ONS) Began Shamelessly Lying About Number of Dead People

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?