Does Sirius (still) give anything back to those whose work it is exploiting? Or does it give a shell about Free software communities?

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is in so much technical, legal, and financial trouble that now it is chasing those who criticise the company, even without naming the company or anyone inside the company; this means that on top of being a ‘parasite’ (preying on Free software with false labeling) the company has become a true enemy of freedom of speech, guarding misbehaving people from their critics

THE company I left is in a state of disarray. The management in question was largely exploiting and seeking to start profiting from (aka ‘monetising’) Free-as-in-freedom software without contributing anything back. In recent years it wasn’t even adopting Free software and instead abandoning it in favour of proprietary spyware. There was no debate about it. It’s a one-way relationship.

Similarly, there was a one-way relationship with staff. People were expected to stay up all night, actually working, while some management in daytime failed to do very basic work, very fundamental tasks. High-tech labour with low-end wages may seem sustainable, but as inflation soars it becomes a stretch. Then, the company as a whole becomes untenable.

This past year I started talking privately about the situation with a friend; names of people and names of companies weren’t included (not even Sirius!), but the company was eager to crush staff, silence staff, and dodge liabilities to staff.

Below we include the second part of an extensive section, which will later be supported by hard evidence.

Sirius urgently needs to rename. It is not doing “Open Source”; instead it rips apart the infrastructure that was Open Source, replacing it with proprietary spyware (for a number of years already; this year the trend accelerated further). “Sirius Open Wash” would be a suitable new name for the company, but maybe it’s too late because the company has no future anyway.

The bullying intensified months ago. Managers basically start with the supposition that all workers are guilty of something and then try to dig for “evidence” to justify the foregone conclusion, making up or exaggerating things while resorting to distortion various rules and regulations (gymnastics in logic), reaching out to things said as far back as 4 years ago (when staff had been subjected to bullying from management).

We certainly would have sued Sirius if it wasn’t so broke and operating through shells, at least one of which registered outside the country.

Text from the report included below:

Roy does not talk about the company where he works, at least not by name. He does not mention people and clients of the company. If Roy discusses that with a friend in some chat outside of work, that’s perfectly within his rights. If the company does something wrong and Roy then discusses it with somebody, that might even be a positive contribution. Nobody should be above criticism. If Roy discusses romantic relationship between colleagues without even naming them, that’s perfectly lawful (there’s no need to twist a romantic relationship as “living arrangement”, covering up for how inadequate that is). As the main issue discussed isn’t the nature of the relationship but the nepotism and abject lack of relevant qualification/s, this is a matter of broader or professional interest. It’s not mere gossip and either way, nobody is named. To be very clear, informal IRC chat with one person is not “social media”; pretending that it is would be considered fact-twisting. IRC has been around since the 1980s, Roy has its own IRC network, and there are no companies or “data broker” chewing up this data. The data is maintained in a privacy-conscious manner on a server managed independently. To some people, very fundamental facts about communication tools leads to evasion of proper understanding, either deliberately or accidentally.

The accusations against Roy mostly latch onto cherry-picking of words, all that while ignoring the underlying substance, which is expressed relatively politely (no expletives, but lots of typos because it’s very informal chat). There seems to be a lot of tit-for-tat over the ‘teat’ (to be clear, the company’s high-paid managers were milking Roy for years; Roy’s salary would have increased with inflation by about 40% in 12 years, but that didn’t happen).

So who’s milking who?

New video:

Video’s description:

To donate to our poverty and health work in Uganda, buy Wefwafwa a coffee,

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/awmedicalvideos/c/4543523

Currently we are spending 0% of this budget on administration, it all goes into the work directly.

Direct link to Wefwafwa’s channel, https://www.youtube.com/@WefwafwaAndrew

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Covax

https://www.who.int/initiatives/act-accelerator/covax

WHO, Covid vaccine site

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines

Site as of 12st December 2022

Everyone, everywhere, should have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

WHO is determined to maintain the momentum for increasing access to COVID-19 vaccines,

and will continue to support countries in accelerating vaccine delivery,

to save lives and prevent people from becoming seriously ill.

Countries should continue to work towards vaccinating at least 70% of their populations

WHO vaccine equity site

https://www.who.int/campaigns/vaccine-equity

This represents a serious threat to the fragile economic recovery,

including due to the risk of new variants creating large waves of serious disease,

and death in populations with low vaccination coverage.

Director general press release

https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing—14-december-2022

Only one in five people in low-income countries has been vaccinated;

Access to diagnostics and life-saving treatments for COVID-19 remains unacceptably unaffordable and unequal;

Also mentioned

Greater Horn of Africa

Cholera outbreaks in 29 countries

Haiti, 1,200 confirmed cases, 14,000 suspected and 280 reported deaths

Haiti received almost 1.2 million doses of oral cholera vaccines

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/263838/Green-Book-Chapter-14v2_0.pdf

50% of severe cases die within a few hours

With good treatment, mortality is less than 1%

Faecal–oral route

Oral, killed cholera vaccine

Contains 1mg of recombinant cholera toxin

Four strains of killed Vibrio cholerae

Video download link | md5sum 0c301ce0818bf40fea64e7c3f7de0520
A Demolition Job in Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Like we’ve seen at the European Patent Office (EPO), the people who view individuals as “resources” (to be sold) are there to undermine the interests of those “resources”; just like at the EPO, in Sirius (which I left this month) these “resources” were treated poorly and their right to free speech (or freedom of expression) was denied

THE situation — communications-wise — at Sirius ‘Open Source’ can be characterised as dishonesty, outright lying, and cover-up. Many failures are being plastered over. Those aren’t ‘white lies’ or benign spin; they misinform people to keep them onboard and mislead clients, who may otherwise choose more wisely who to trust.

The term Human Resources (HR) is offensive for all sorts of reasons. As workers of the EPO quickly find out upon arrival, Human Resources people actively work against the staff. They undermine workers’ rights.

Sirius does not have Human Resources staff; it outsources this function. In companies with a Human Resources department there’s generally an interest/incentive at HR to keep the company in tact, otherwise that department too will be out of work. No workers? Then no HR! But when it’s outsourced the logistics change a lot.

The lesson to take from this is, when companies try to behave in this way the time is right to leave. No lawyers were being consulted by the company until it was too late; the company’s management single-handedly doomed the company. It seems unlikely to survive until its next (25^th) anniversary.

“Under control” or controlled demolition?

Summary: Everything at Sirius ‘Open Source’ has been very rapidly coming down this year; not much was left of the company, more was being outsourced (what’s left), then the “office manager” (for an office that does not exist) went on extended leave (causing severe operational problems/lapses), and a ‘controlled demolition’ sequence was initiated to deprive remaining staff of severance payments/separation fees

THE situation at Sirius is not just bad. It is very bad. It is chaotic. There are even confidential documents to that effect, but we’re not sharing confidential and sensitive material here.

The company continues to fake its size and its future prospects. That basically involves deceit or — to put it more bluntly — lying.

The current ‘UK’ CEO (the company likes to pretend that it operates from the US as well, but everyone inside the company can see beyond this façade) showed some promise at first, but over the past year the evasion and pointless finger-pointing became too much. Some believe that he came from a client (not the first such ‘manager’) without even mentioning this anywhere, but actually he came from the University of Oxford. He used to work on a large project that became a lot smaller over time. Some think that maybe he got sacked and used Sirius as a landing point or ‘consolation prize’. In fact, coming from the client (far bigger) to managing a very small team that’s rapidly decreasing in size is a bad sign. It’s not a rational migration; one lucky colleagues moved in exactly the opposite direction (to the public sector with job security). Either way, Cambridge University and the University of Oxford are known for all sorts of things, including patronising behaviour that had both institutions dubbed “Oxbridge” — a ticket to “the club” (Eton et al).

In Sirius, either you’re in the club or you’re being obstructed by the club. If you sleep with a member of the club, you get special access. But that’s a shortcut and an exception.

I’ve no personal grudge with the University of Oxford. I used to work with them and went there regularly when completing my doctoral degree; but that seems to be a place where people are taught never to admit mistakes or listen properly. I had several very lengthy talks with management, but even though I was being heard (or maybe even listened to) this resulted in no changes, not even basic compliance.

Sadly for the dude from the University of Oxford, he is harming the company he was entrusted to manage and soon he might be out of work, with nothing to show for it (not even a company left to write a reference for him).

The text below is the first part of the last major section. It’s about how the charismatic genius from the University of Oxford decided to become judge, jury, executioner, and monarch. That culminated in truly irrational and self-harming behaviour — a vindictive campaign of witch-hunting to defend one’s big ego.

The Self-Destruction

The company — and it seems safe to predict so — has reached a point of no return. A new client, Argo AI, officially became defunct earlier this month. The company’s recent meetings (Sirius and Support Team) suggested that they needed to lay off staff but preferred to encourage any of those attending to take voluntary resignation instead, i.e. no compensation. The Support Team is the majority of the company, so this is a very big deal.

It’s reasonable to assume the company looked for excuses to dismiss without compensation, seeing its financial state (which is in the public domain for all to see). Staff was repeatedly asked whether it was willing to “voluntarily” resign, i.e. leave without compensation. Nobody ever said “yes”, in spite of the question being asked several times. External HR people were apparently (allegedly a company that provides other service to Sirius) advising and steering towards this strategy.

For a number of weeks there was apparently an effort to take this further, looking for reasons to dismiss staff, preferably without compensation. Prior to that, around July, Roy was already cautioned he had been put on a “shortlist” (a bit of a vague term).

Video download link | md5sum 7fe1fe13ceb4d6a779380ededbafb8b4
Security Impermissible in Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Some years ago my employer was abandoning (piece-wise) its own infrastructure along with Free software, security, and privacy, in effect rendering the company a set of accounts in various third-party servers overseas (security breaches were routine but conveniently ignored)

THE company I left this month, Sirius ‘Open Source’, gave me a lot of abuse (like unjust threats) for merely doing what’s right and what’s legal. No person should be in such a position, but choices were limited during a pandemic and working from home is generally preferable, even if the working hours are quite insane.

A company that used to have its own telephony system and do conference calls over Asterisk (or similar) later became some Zoom or Skype or Google tenant, subjecting the company’s operations to total surveillance. A company that used to manage accounts with self-hosted OpenLDAP gradually started creating accounts in third parties like Slack and LastPass. No wonder system administrators left; their job was made obsolete and the roles had increasingly become almost clerical, not technical. Bad technology was chosen or outsourced to. It was all proprietary. No control, no room for learning, no customisation, and nothing to actually offer.

Summary: The Sirius ‘Open Source’ management made the decision (without any consultation with the staff affected) to outsource key operations to foreign, third-party entities that are subjected to the US government’s prying eyes and several of the National Security Agency’s programs; this affected clients as well (usually without their awareness, let alone consent)

THIS is the last part of the third section of a report I left with the company before leaving at the start of this month. There will be a lot more information about this scandal next month. Recent E-mails are appended below (with certain stuff redacted for privacy’s sake).

I cautioned about this repeatedly (for about 4 years) and suffered retribution, threats, and more. Nothing has improved since then.

As just a little sample, please see the E-mails at the bottom (recent); shared in the future will be some longer E-mails about this issue.

But first… the report.

The morale around that time was low, set aside COVID-19 becoming a growing problem, along with lock-downs. Roy noted that in order to comply with the law he cannot post clients’ details on the Slack network. So he chose to obey the regulations and the law, in line with security standards. Stuff like “hi” is probably considered OK and safe enough for Slack, but not addresses, passwords etc. Things have not improved since, as the final section notes again (with examples).

This long section, along with written messages as evidence, is very important. Bad leadership worsened the corporate climate and changed how people viewed the company from within, if not from the outside as well.

This document now proceeds to a discussion about the latest and maybe the final blow. The company already had capacity issues (not enough staff to cover shifts) and now it’s even worse.

Roy and Rianne hoped to prevent a ‘death spiral’ and ironically enough it seems like the company wants to accelerate its own ‘death spiral’, due to tactless, insensitive remarks.

One of many messages to that effect — messages which I was sending for years to highlight the problem. Of course nothing was done about this; usually there was not even as much as a reply. Hush hush as a company-wide policy…

This one is from August of this year:

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2022 09:00:50 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317
 Thunderbird/1.0.2 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0
From: Roy Schestowitz
Subject: Handover to Shift 2 (30/08/22)
To: [whole team]

[...]

https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/lastpass-data-breach-source-code-stolen

users need to change all the passwords they have there and not keep them
there if they value real security not paper mills.

Another one from August of this year:

Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2022 03:10:53 +0100
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317
 Thunderbird/1.0.2 Mnenhy/0.7.4.0
Content-Language: en-US
From: Roy Schestowitz
Subject: Slack admits to leaking hashed passwords for five years
To: [whole team]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2022/08/08/slack-admits-to-leaking-hashed-passwords-for-three-months/

Does not surprise me at all. They only admit this because they got
caught, hence they need to spin this somehow, belittling the severity,
just as LastPass did after several blunders (it had suffered a breach).
The way forward is self-hosting and encrypting things (on server one
controls, not leasing).

Yellow card scheme, Don’t wait for someone else to report it

www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/yellow-card-please-h…

It is estimated that only 10% of serious reactions and between 2 and 4% of non-serious reactions are reported.

Yellow card government site, just a click away

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting

As of 23 November 2022, (UK)

Pfizer/BioNTech, monovalent and bivalent

177,925 Yellow Cards have been reported

AstraZeneca

246,866 have been reported

Moderna, monovalent and bivalent

47,045 have been reported

Novavax

52 reports

Brand of vaccine was not specified

2,130 reports

Total reports

474,018

Overall reporting rate

Around 2 to 5 Yellow Cards per 1,000 doses administered

In the 28 days

Pfizer/BioNTech, + 2,499 reports

AstraZeneca, + 228

Moderna, + 1,099

Novavax, + 15

Brand not specified, + 154

For all COVID-19 vaccines

injection-site reactions (sore arm for example)

generalised symptoms such as ‘flu-like’ illness

headache, chills, fatigue (tiredness), nausea (feeling sick), fever, dizziness, weakness, aching muscles, rapid heartbeat

they may be reported more frequently in younger adults

Overall, our advice remains that the benefits of the vaccines outweigh the risks in the majority of people.

The benefits of the vaccines in preventing COVID-19 and serious complications associated with COVID-19 far outweigh any currently known side effects in the majority of patients.

https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/psb.1789

Google YT guidelines

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785

Claims that an approved COVID-19 vaccine will cause death, infertility, miscarriage, autism, or contraction of other infectious diseases

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulatory-approval-of-covid-19-vaccine-moderna/information-for-healthcare-professionals-on-covid-19-vaccine-moderna

4.4 Special warnings and precautions for use

Hypersensitivity and anaphylaxis
Anaphylaxis has been reported in individuals who have received Spikevax.

Close observation for at least 15 minutes is recommended following vaccination.

Myocarditis and pericarditis

There is an increased risk for myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination with Spikevax.

Few days, primarily occurred within 14 days,

more often after the second dose,

more often in younger males

risk profile appears to be similar for the second and the third dose

Available data suggest that the course of myocarditis and pericarditis following vaccination is not different from myocarditis or pericarditis in general.

Healthcare professionals should be alert to the signs and symptoms of myocarditis and pericarditis.

Vaccinated individuals should be instructed to seek immediate medical attention if they develop symptoms indicative of myocarditis or pericarditis,

such as (acute or persisting) chest pain, shortness of breath or palpitations following vaccination.

Healthcare professionals should consult guidance and/or specialists to diagnose and treat this condition.

Who can get a COVID-19 vaccine

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-vaccination/coronavirus-vaccine/

Everyone aged 5 (on or before 31 August 2022) and over can get a 1st and 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

People aged 16 and over, and some children aged 12 to 15, can also get a booster dose.
Hypertension after COVID-19 vaccination

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34985455/

Italian research