On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
By these criteria, the posted article would seem to be an edge case. I lean toward the "on-topic" side, because it isn't just reporting some routine disaster -- rather it touches (quite deeply, in my view) on the nature of how we really come know about important events that affect our daily lives.
And because this information damn well should have been covered on TV news, around the time it was known to investigators. Why it wasn't is, in my view, certainly a valid question to ask.