The original claim from some Russian forum was a re-write of white supremacist literature and was a hoax.

That specific claim being complete and utter bunk is neither here nor there about any other issues Stars may or may not have.

Yes.

The arts hotel page in TripAdvisor is taking a hammering!

I can't find it.

Any chance you could reply with a link?

Cheers.

So following this. Got back home and didn't really bother and while watchin a vid on youtube my comp freezes and reboots with this msg. Also happened again today while I was grinding

http://t.co/uuPApefv4n anyone good with computers knows if it's serious?

Haven't read through the whole thread but this is what I think:

1. This is 100% an inside job involving only the hotel staff or a collaboration between staff members and an external organized group of criminals.

2. You should have approached the police independently, because:

a) the staff doesn't have any interest about the police getting involved for obvious reasons

b) PS have limited possibilities to do much, and more importantly they will try to get as a quite resolution to this as possible, because they don't want their brand to be associated with any negative experience during their events (I know the local police won't be necessarily a big help, but that perhaps should've brought more attention and put more pressure on PS to take this more seriously).

3. I agree that PS have to step up the security at all hotels during all events, but quite frankly, guys, you cannot hold them responsible for the safety of your personal belongings inside your hotel rooms. This is everyone's personal individual responsibility. You are a very high profile poker player and you can't just leave your laptop unsecured in your hotel room during one of the biggest poker events there is, I would expect that this event is a specifically targeted by the poker underground world or have you all already forgotten what happened On March 6, 2010 in Berlin??? I am sorry to say this but it seams very naive.

4. I know you feel that something very very terrible happened to you but I think it is quite the opposite - you were able to find out that your laptop was hijacked and knew what's going on. So you should consider yourself rather extremely lucky, because if this hasn't been noticed by you, you would've lost 6-7 figures in the next couple of weeks/months for sure.

Unless, of course, the NSA got their claws on it...

The screenshot indicates a hard drive failing. Normally I would say you are in the marked for a new hdd or sdd (might cost you nothing if you still have warranty for the computer).

But considering all the posts in this thread, I'm not sure. Maybe somebody can take a closer look at your computer.

This should open the page.

i see half a dozen new one star reviews by new, first timers, so similar they could have been written by the same person..

People generally tend to do everything but cooperate when attacked, but maybe Ritz is different.

.. as an aside.. Tripadvisor itself was hacked a couple years ago. Some 20 million members' information was hijacked.

my heart kinda skipped when the security manager said "your friend may not seem as close to you as u think" or something along those lines...kinda like a sick twist in the story. good to hear it wasn't true though.

good read. i hope they catch the cockroaches who were in on this. hotel definitely had something to do with it. with pokerstars resources there should be no reason not to find the culprit.

Interesting entry by pc_ihc on Aug.13 titled "Terrible Management!"

B.Z. , the hotel mgr, actually left contact info in a response to pc_ihc's post... gogogo

Yes. Without encryption your data is basically completely unprotected. They can plug in a USB stick, reboot a different OS off the USB stick, and 30 seconds later have access to everything on your computer.

With full disk encryption, this doesn't work since they have would to guess the password to decrypt everything, else the entire disk is a anonymous blob of data. Assuming its not a trivial password (a single dictionary word, or just a few characters), it takes a LOT of computing password to crack one of the password. Maybe the NSA could do it (but not quickly). It's way beyond the capabilties of an individual or organization right now.

I've never done encryption on my hard drive, but the idea is intriguing me now. My only trepidation is that would be a password you could never forget, or you'd be screwed. But I suppose even if the password wasn't awesome, it would be better than no encryption at all.

i've heard encryption slows you down because everything needs to be decrypted before you can use it.
And once decrypted and placed in memory, it's not encrypted and is unprotected..

but still seems like a good precaution if someone else has physical access to your box.

you can do backups on a extern harddrive without encryption, just keep it in a safe place and don't take it with you on travel. So you don't have to worry about forgetting your passport or get your laptop stolen.

http://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Hotel_...Catalonia.html

This thread now on page 2 if you Google Arts Barcelona

In b4 Arts Barcelona threatens to sue 2p2, lol.

I find it disconcerting that there are so many posters with <50 posts ITT and tons with <10 with way to much to say on the topic. Maybe that's std for NVG (I'm not sure) but I'd suspect something else is at work here.

In b4 some1 explains there is likely a disclaimer for this site that absolves it from any possible legal action that may result from any and all comments, actions, opinions etc. etc. that may be expressed/generated/performed from/by its employees, members or affiliates.

GG, WP Sklansky

Actually 2p2 already has a court ruling that they are not responsible for what people post.

^or this

[Edit] is there a link btw PP? Sounds like another interesting read.

Bumping to contribute to SEO efforts.

Arts Barcelona

only problems is "arts barcelona" is normally searched at an average rate of only once per day lately, unless I'm reading THIS wrong.

Even if this thread makes page one on the google search it doesn't mean a lot.

hmm... i am reading it wrong. I don't know if this chart can be interpreted to show the number of searches or not.

I don't think we need dozens of posts now with the words "Arts Barcelona" (DYSWIDT?) in them solely trying to move this thread up the Google ranks - 2+2 threads get excellent results in Google naturally. Also, while I don't claim to be an expert on this, I think there's a point where excessive posting of the same name will actually hurt the page rank, as search algorithms start treating it as spam/intentional attempt to game the system.

Pretty damn hard to break onto the first search page of a big hotel anyway - their own website, Wiki, TripAdvisor, hotels.com, etc., are all pretty ensconced there.

However, I notice that the same search brings up "News for arts barcelona", which is filled with articles about this story on different sites.