Tech
Hacker linked to Epstein removed from Black Hat cyber conference website
Vincenzo Iozzo, a renowned hacker linked to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is no longer listed on the website of Black Hat, one of the largest cybersecurity conferences in the world, nor on the Japanese security conference Code Blue.
As of Thursday, Iozzo does not appear on the official review board pages of Black Hat or Code Blue. He was still listed on both pages as of last week. Iozzo had been on the Black Hat review board since 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In a statement shared with TechCrunch through a spokesperson, Iozzo said he told Black Hat that he “will not willingly resign” and welcomed “a full investigation.”
Spokespeople for Black Hat did not respond to requests for comment.
Iozzo, currently the founder and chief executive of cybersecurity startup SlashID, has had a long career in the industry. Iozzo authored one of the first manuals for hackers researching Apple’s mobile software, and in 2015, founded cybersecurity startup IperLane, which was later bought by CrowdStrike, leading him to serve as a senior director at the company for almost four years.
Iozzo’s name appears in more than 2,300 documents, some of which contain several emails, released on January 30 as part of the Department of Justice’s legally required effort to publish materials from its investigation into the late financier and sex trafficker.
Iozzo’s interactions with Epstein span from October 2014 until December 2018. In late 2018, the Miami Herald published news stories detailing allegations that Epstein abused more than 60 women, some of them teenage girls.
After these stories were published, newly released emails show Iozzo was trying to meet with Epstein at his New York town house.
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Among the new material published by the Justice Department, beyond the more than 2,300 documents mentioning Iozzo, there was also a report from an FBI informant who claimed Epstein had a “personal hacker.” The document is redacted and does not name the alleged hacker. However, some of the identifying details included in the document strongly suggest that the informant believed Iozzo was Epstein’s hacker. Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera reported on the emails earlier this month and named Iozzo as the person likely redacted in the informant document.
It’s important to note that the claims and allegations by the FBI informant were not confirmed by the FBI and may be partially wrong. Furthermore, there is no evidence in the emails that suggests Iozzo did anything unlawful for Epstein.
Iozzo said in his statement to TechCrunch that he “knew Epstein for professional reasons” and that he wished he had not, but he denied claims that he was Epstein’s hacker or did any hacking for him.
“We were introduced in 2014 when I was a 25-year-old at MIT fundraising for my startup, by people whom I trusted and admired. Because of this, I failed to ask the right questions that, in retrospect, seem obvious,” read the statement, sent by his spokesperson Joan Vollero. “I foolishly accepted the narrative that was presented to me by others that greatly minimized the magnitude of his horrific actions. I regret the past association and take full responsibility for not exercising greater judgment at the time.”
“My interactions with Epstein were limited to business opportunities that never materialized, as well as discussions of the markets and emerging technologies. I never observed nor participated in any illegal activity or behavior,” Iozzo added.
In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14 and registered as a sex offender in Florida and New York. In 2018, new reports emerged that Epstein was allegedly a serial sex abuser and had trafficked underage girls at his private island. After these new reports, the Justice Department formally charged Epstein in 2019 of trafficking, exploiting, and abusing dozens of underage girls. Epstein later died in jail.
Neither Iozzo’s spokesperson Vollero, nor his attorney Emma Spiro, explained why Iozzo was removed from Black Hat’s website, but did not dispute the removal.
“Mr. Iozzo welcomed an independent investigation from Black Hat, rather than a knee-jerk removal decision, because he is confident that he would be cleared through that process,” said Vollero.
Code Blue spokesperson Ken-ichi Saito confirmed to TechCrunch that the conference removed Iozzo’s name from its review board. Saito said the conference had been “preparing for this update for several months” to remove Iozzo and two other review board members “who had not been active” and that the “the timing of our website update coincidentally overlapped with the public release of the Epstein documents.”
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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