[NJ_gent]

From reading the article, I get the feeling these guys have never heard of Hawking, let alone read his work. I'm not saying they're wrong (that would be awfully presumptuous of me), but the article certainly doesn't explain how they discount Hawking's black hole work so readily. For one thing, Hawking worked out how information could be maintained within a black hole by examining it in multiple dimensions.

[snarks_when_bored]

I suppose you're referring to Hawking's September, 2005, paper: Information Loss in Black Holes. I've not read it, but I read a discussion of it on Peter Woit's blog: Hawking in Dublin. The upshot of that discussion was that the details of what Hawking is proposing need firming up. In the meantime, Chapline and his collaborators are going their own way, no doubt aware that Hawking and others are working on the information loss problem, but believing that they're onto something themselves.