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I agree with you senexa that it is wise to look at alternative work going on (maybe less visibly). I dont mean "fringe"---my taste runs to the conventional mainstream---but just less publicized. Not everybody has hawkings showmanship of course.
I looked at your links.
Maybe you would like to look at my candidate for a dark horse resolution of the BH info paradox. these are senior mainstream people. Jorge Pullin is the editor/publisher of the American Physics Society's newsletter on gravity and general relativity stuff----it is online and called "Matters of Gravity"
These two papers came out, May 2004 and June 2004:
"No black hole information puzzle in a relational universe"
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0405183
"Realistic clocks, universal decoherence and the black hole information paradox"
http://arxiv.org/hep-th/0406260
They are not science journalism articles, or popularly presented, but the basic ideas are not so hard and (if you look at them and are curious) I can try to provide the journalistic interpretation for you.
no reporter has picked up on this work---I guess they didnt go out fishing for reporters---but I think it may ultimately represent more of an advance than
what is getting media attention at the moment
A thought: the "information paradox" is really about the passage of time.
black holes evaporate---typically at a very very slow rate
this gives a direction and a kind of irreversibility to the progress of time
whatever pattern or structure falls into the hole would seem to be wiped out----it falls in and then eventually the hole evaporates----finito---nada.
to match this, these guys say, there MAY POSSIBLY be a fundamental very slow rate at which information itself fades---even without the disaster of falling into a black hole!
they look at the idea of a fundamental universal rate that pure quantum states with definite numbers describing them very gradually get muddled and spread out into a statistical mix of nearby states.
the quantum mechanics business is technical---it is just the conventional way people have of talking about their information about the world----sorry if it sounds clunky. But what this is saying really is that the mathematical machinery of Quantum Mechanics is inadequate at present because it lacks a built in mechanism for the very slow decay of information
It says there is a slow decay in nature which is not reflected in the machinery. So somehow a decay term has to be added to the symbolic machinery.
At present, using conventional quantum mechanics, a pure state can evolve with time but it always remains a crisp pure state. there is no very very slow natural decay of information.
Jorge Pullin and his friends make a general argument from looking at black holes, using only fairly general assumptions, that the view of time-evolution must change so that information decays----and then there will be good things! there will be a natural irreversible direction to time, and also the paradox will go away.
although there are some formulas it is basically pretty simple
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