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, or celebrities, 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.

I can think of many way more on-topic submissions. They are the ones where no one is upset and everyone is nerding out about an obscure topic.

Let me be clear, classifying this submission as off topic is not cut and dry. My point was there is clearly good justification for it in the official guidelines.

- it's not a topic that fosters intellectual curiosity because it is somewhat rage inducing. It's outrageous. It's frustrating and it's scary. It's very likely to upset people.

- it's also related to a controversial celebrity

- it's also about crime

- it's also something that surely will be covered by TV news

These things are laid out right there clearly in the guidelines.

I am choosing to give the moderators the benefit of the doubt because I believe they are doing their best to try and foster good intellectually curious dialog and minimize emotionally charged heel digging disrespectful debates and flame wars.