Welcome to the June 2026 edition of the Blu-ray Bounty. This is where we review the latest 4K Blu-ray releases each month, judging each disc on its video and audio quality, to see if they’ll make a worthy addition to your collection. If you’re new to Blu-ray Bounty, you can check out previous editions here.

We’re big fans of 4K Blu-ray here at TechRadar, and some of us are even collectors ourselves. As TechRadar’s TV tester, I use 4K Blu-ray to test the best TVs and the best soundbars, as it offers uncompressed video and audio for the best picture and sound you can get at home.

Accenture’s Paraic Rattigan explores his role as an infrastructure and capital projects manager in a space that looks vastly different to when he first started out.

“I’ve always been interested in engineering and the built environment and enjoyed solving technical problems,” explained Paraic Rattigan, an infrastructure and capital projects manager at Accenture. 

He told SiliconRepublic.com that, as was common with his generation growing up in Ireland, he saw first-hand the career opportunities created during the building boom of the Celtic Tiger – leading him to pursue civil engineering studies.

“I did my undergraduate degree in civil engineering at UCD, back when the faculty was one of the few remaining based in Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin. I was relatively young when I finished my undergrad and was enjoying student life, so I opted to pursue a postgraduate degree immediately after and eventually graduated with a PhD.”

What educational and work experiences led you to the role you have now?

Since then, I have worked for international engineering consultancy firms, both in Ireland and in Canada. During my time in Canada, I felt the urge to broaden my professional knowledge, so I pursued an MBA at the University of British Columbia and moved into more strategy and consulting-type roles.

Eventually the draw to return to Ireland proved too strong and I moved back with my partner (now wife) Jackie in 2019. Since settling back in Ireland, I have held public sector roles supporting research, policy and economic development, across sectors such as renewable energy, transportation, sustainability and manufacturing. I joined Accenture’s growing Infrastructure and Capital Projects team in early 2024.

What were the biggest surprises or challenges you encountered on your career path and how did you deal with them?

I think the diversity and breadth of the roles required to deliver large capital projects was something many, including myself, underestimated.

It requires moving from a narrow perspective that focuses on engineers, architects and contractors, to an understanding that to successfully deliver large infrastructure requires an experienced community of practitioners including legal, commercial, governance, technology, alongside the more traditional construction professionals and trades. I think the role and importance of local and national government, from a long-term strategic, planning, policy and budgetary perspective is commonly underestimated in the delivery of long-term major projects and programmes, although this now seems to be changing.

Also, looking back, the scale and speed of technological advancement across society and the workplace is remarkable.

When I started in UCD, mobile phones were only just becoming commonplace and laptops were a rarity at undergraduate level, but within a few short years they were the norm and quickly became essential from both personal and business perspectives.

Since then, it seems like every few years there is a change in ways of working, from a pivot to digital tools, through to cloud solutions, to hybrid and remote working and now the adoption of artificial intelligence. The modern workforce must be much more agile and open to change and disruption.

What do you enjoy about your job?

Construction has traditionally been a slow adopter of technology and project teams are often cited as the barrier to change. But the reality is that complex projects come with significant time and cost pressures.

What’s exciting now is that a tipping point is being reached, where building more quickly, more sustainably and with greater control means any efficiency advantage really counts. Accenture has embraced that shift, combining its history of tech delivery and digital transformation with specialist capital project expertise and being part of that effort to reinvent the construction sector is what I find most energising about my role.

What aspects of your personality do you feel make you suited to this job?

Since no two days or assignments are ever the same, having the ability to solve problems, be organised and understand how to prioritise tasks is particularly beneficial. I also take a logical approach to most projects and like to work back from the intended outcome and plan accordingly.

Complex problems need to be broken down early into component parts, otherwise they can quickly become overwhelming. My career to date has taught me that an up-front investment in planning (no matter how small the task), alongside adequate interim check-points, tends to pay off in the long run.

How did your current company support you on your career path?

There are always interesting opportunities, whether that be in areas in which I’m already experienced or in new emerging areas.

Since joining Accenture, I’ve been involved in projects across energy generation and transmission, transportation, healthcare and most recently data centres. I have benefited greatly from working alongside international industry experts across these projects. Also, I think that hybrid working has been a game-changer for many including myself. Living outside the Dublin commuter belt and with a young family, the ability to work seamlessly with our local and international teams has been a big plus for me.

What advice would you give to those considering a career in this area, or just starting out in one?

Be curious, ask questions and do your research. There are so many diverse and interesting skillsets required to deliver capital projects and with such strong current demand there really is an opportunity in the sector for everyone, regardless of where you see your strengths or interests.

Also, remember that careers are never linear or pre-determined. I constantly meet people from a variety of backgrounds and educational pathways who have evolved and changed direction multiple times before ending up in a role they love. Most importantly, be proactive about shaping the direction of your own career. Like life, your career is a journey, not a destination.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Two teams who booked their places in the last 32 with big wins meet in Seattle, as Belgium face Senegal at the FIFA World Cup 2026 — and you can live stream the match around the world for free.

Belgium shrugged off underwhelming draws with Egypt and Iran to thrash New Zealand 5-1 and snatch top spot in Group G. Manager Rudi Garcia would have been pleased to see Leandro Trossard score twice, while Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku also found the net. Lukaku dropped to the bench against New Zealand so Garcia must decide whether Belgium’s all-time record goalscorer is best deployed as an impact substitute. Charles De Ketelaere, who is yet to score at the tournament, may continue as a false nine. Center-back Nathan Ngoy is available after serving a one-match ban following his red card against Egypt.

Honda this week began production of batteries destined for energy storage systems, according to a report from Nikkei Asia. The milestone makes Honda the latest car company to dive into the red-hot energy market.

The automaker’s shift toward energy storage comes three months after Honda canceled its EV programs in the U.S. Batteries for the EVs were slated to be made at a factory in Ohio, which Honda operates under a joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Now, those cells are headed to data centers instead of driveways. 

Honda’s pivot comes as demand for EVs in the U.S. remains soft following the GOP’s cancellation of tax credits, which were intended to spur EV and battery production in the U.S. Sales of new EVs remain down year-over-year, in part because consumers pulled forward their purchases to take advantage of the tax credits, which disappeared last September.

That uncertainty led Honda to dramatically shift gears, canceling three EVs that were destined for the U.S. market. The automaker wrote down $15.7 billion last fiscal year, in part to restructure its EV strategy. Its weakening China business, where EVs have soared, also contributed to the write-down.

But despite the restructuring, Honda didn’t dissolve its joint venture with LG Energy. And like seemingly every other automaker, including Tesla, Ford, and GM, Honda decided that batteries are a big business on their own.

The market for stationary storage has been booming, growing 32% year-over-year, according to a report from SEIA and Benchmark Minerals. In the first quarter of this year, 9.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage systems were installed. That’s enough batteries to build roughly 120,000 EVs. 

The breakneck growth is expected to continue. By the end of the decade, the report estimates that 110 gigawatt-hours of energy storage will be installed every year, nearly tripling the size of the market. 

It’s been a profitable market, too. Tesla, which has claimed the majority of sales so far, rakes in 30% gross profits on its Megapacks and Powerwalls, about twice its margin on vehicles. 

Many stationary batteries have been installed at data centers, but a large chunk of them end up connected to the grid. As battery prices have fallen, they’ve carved out a sizable niche stabilizing the grid while also augmenting wind and solar installations, making them more predictable generating sources. 

Honda may not be sure how to approach the EV market in the U.S., but it’s clear it wants in on the energy transition in one form or another.

For years, organizations have relied on secure email gateways, reputation services, and signature-based detection to stop phishing attacks before they reached employees. While these technologies remain important, today’s email threats increasingly exploit trusted identities and legitimate business workflows that often appear completely normal.

Next week, on July 8, 2026 at 2 PM ET, BleepingComputer will host a live webinar titled “Stop chasing alerts: Automating email security with behavioral AI” presented by Dan Nickolaisen, Solutions Architect Manager at Abnormal AI, and Eric Danneker, Director of Cyber Vigilance and Defense at Novant Health.

The webinar will examine how modern phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and account takeover (ATO) attacks bypass traditional email defenses and how behavioral AI can help security teams automate detection, investigation, and remediation.

Many of today’s attacks don’t rely on malicious attachments, known malware, or suspicious domains. Instead, attackers increasingly impersonate trusted colleagues, vendors, and business partners while abusing legitimate authentication workflows to blend into everyday business communications.

As a result, security teams often face lengthy investigations to determine whether an email is malicious, whether an account has been compromised, and what actions should be taken to contain the threat.

Abnormal AI applies behavioral AI to analyze communication patterns and account activity, helping organizations identify suspicious behavior, reduce manual investigations, and accelerate response workflows.

Attendees will learn practical approaches for identifying sophisticated email threats that traditional security controls may overlook while improving operational efficiency through automation.

Modern email attacks are changing faster than traditional defenses

Email remains one of the most effective ways for attackers to gain access to organizations because many campaigns now exploit trust rather than technical vulnerabilities.

Rather than relying solely on malware or credential theft, threat actors increasingly impersonate legitimate business contacts, abuse trusted authentication workflows, and compromise existing accounts to evade traditional security controls.

This webinar will explore how behavioral AI can help organizations identify suspicious behavior, automate investigations, and improve response efforts against today’s evolving email threats.

The upcoming webinar will cover:

• How modern phishing, BEC, and ATO attacks bypass traditional email security controls
• Why techniques such as Device Code phishing can circumvent traditional detection methods
• The operational challenges these attacks create for security teams
• How behavioral AI can automate detection, investigation, and remediation workflows
• Practical approaches for reducing investigation time and improving email security operations

Join us to learn how organizations can strengthen email security against today’s increasingly sophisticated threats.

→ Register now to secure your spot!

The autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money’s flowing back, and it’s the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to talk about AV déjà vu and what he’s learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

In a World Cup, some of the most important matches are decided by a penalty shootout. When that moment comes, the captains want to win the coin toss to decide the order of the kicks. The reason is an old belief: that regardless of the skill of the shooter and the goalkeeper, the team that takes the first penalty kick is more likely to win. Most soccer players take this for granted, but the reasons behind this apparent advantage remain a subject of scientific debate.n

While much of the strategic thinking around penalty kicks focuses on the order in which the players kick, it’s also important to note the psychological pressures as well. During this year’s World Cup, two of the first four round-of-32 matches—Paraguay’s win over Germany and Morocco’s defeat of the Netherlands—have been decided by these highly tense shootouts.

For years, the prevailing explanation was psychological. According to this hypothesis, the team that takes the first penalty kick plays with less pressure, while the second team must constantly respond to avoid falling behind on the scoreboard. That emotional burden ultimately affects the players’ performance. A study published in 2010 in the American Economic Review became the benchmark on the subject, reporting that teams that started the shootout won nearly 60 percent of the time, compared to 40 percent for those who took their penalty kicks second.

However, as databases grew and more researchers began studying the phenomenon, that advantage began to diminish. Most subsequent studies do not dispute that psychological pressure exists on the team that shoots second; what they question is whether that pressure is sufficient to produce much of a difference in the probability of winning a shootout.

Studies published in 2012, 2019, 2023, 2024, and 2025 progressively reduced the estimated size of the advantage. The most comprehensive analysis to date, based on nearly 7,000 penalty shootouts and 74,000 shots, found no evidence that the team taking the first shot wins more often than the team taking the second. Furthermore, the authors concluded that, if any advantage exists, it would be less than 1.8 percentage points—a much smaller difference than the much-discussed 60-40 split.

A new group of researchers believes this question has been framed incorrectly. A recent study published in Football Studies suggests that, rather than asking whether there is an advantage to taking the first penalty kick, we should explain where that advantage might come from when it does occur. Their hypothesis holds that pressure remains the decisive factor but that not all high-pressure situations are the same. The key lies in distinguishing between penalty kicks where a miss immediately eliminates the team and those where a goal secures the victory.

The study states that current soccer rules do not distribute moments of maximum pressure equally. The team that takes the second penalty kick faces situations where a miss means immediate elimination much more frequently, while opportunities to score and win are distributed differently as the shootout progresses.

The researchers found that penalty kicks where a goal immediately secured victory were successful 89.1 percent of the time. In contrast, when a miss meant immediate elimination, the success rate dropped to 60.4 percent. More importantly, they discovered that, once elimination and victory penalties were taken into account, whether a team took the first or second penalty no longer explained a significant portion of the observed performance. According to the authors, the apparent advantage of the first team does not stem from the order of the kicks but rather from the type of psychological situations that order creates.

The authors argue that these differences could have strategic implications. If some players handle extreme pressure better than others, it might be advisable to save them for those high-stakes penalty kicks rather than placing them at the beginning of the shootout.

Godox spent years building lights that help photographers shape what they see. The company’s first camera flips the usual relationship between photographer and device. Instead of a bright rear screen that pulls attention away from the scene, the C100 gives you a clear window you compose through while key information floats on the glass itself.

The C100 camera’s body is 104 x 72 x 19 millimeters and weighs 65 grams, making it light enough to fit easily into a shirt pocket or be attached to a strap like a tiny accessory. The front panel is dominated by a sleek 60.8 x 47.8 millimeter transparent window that allows more than 50% of light to pass through, allowing you to see the real world directly in front of the lens. At the same time, the panel displays some extremely helpful information, like frame lines, exposure data, and battery level, without having to resort to a video feed and muck up the scene.

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Changing the aspect ratio brings the frame lines on the panel up to speed in real time, and you can select from a variety of settings such as 16:9, 4:3, 3:2, and 1:1. The center-weighted meter performs an excellent job of reading the scene and provides a wealth of helpful information, including ISO, aperture, and shutter settings ranging from 100 to 800 in manual steps. Aperture and shutter are linked in ranges from f/1.0 to f/64 and 1/8000 second to 1 second, so as you change one, the other is suggested in the background, which is quite useful if you’re trying to get everything just right before putting up any real film elsewhere.

The controls are as simple as you’d imagine, with only a few of arrow keys and a select button on the back for menu navigation and settings, and the shutter is ready to go with a quick click. There is no standard screen to see the photos you’ve just taken; the image is saved directly to the microSD card as soon as you press the shutter. Once it’s there, you may use USB-C to transfer content to your phone or computer, or you can just remove the card.

Godox claims that the C100 was created to be an all-day camera that allows you to get to the core of the moment with no worry or hassle, as it’s all about seeing and feeling first, then clicking the shutter, and, of course, analyzing your images afterward, when you’re feeling more relaxed. They believe that the wait between snapping the shot and viewing the outcome will make each snapshot feel like a small surprise when you open the files. The actual resolution of the images appears to be on the low side, ranging from 320 to 570 kilobytes, so don’t expect to be making any large prints very soon. Oh, and the camera also shoots video, though the exact specifications are not yet available.

At 199 yuan (or roughly 29 USD), the C100 is clearly in the same category as some of the other recent basic cameras that are all about providing an experience rather than just a set of specifications. It’s a step up from some earlier transparent-window cameras because it has live data overlays rather than static printed graphics, and its creators see it as an ideal companion for film photographers looking for a lightweight metering and framing tool that will fit nicely in their bag alongside their medium-format body.
[Source]

Concerns over the impact of AI chatbots on mental health, personal safety, harassment, and disinformation have forced AI developers to implement safeguards to better control how and what their AI models are allowed to respond or do.

But concerns and worries can’t erode demand. AI offers a lot of promise, and people don’t want a faceless tech company to restrict their access to that potential. And if they can preserve their privacy while they use AI models however they want, why not?

Venice AI, which offers access to more than 200 AI models while allowing users to retain their privacy, is raking it in thanks to that demand. Just two years in, the company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, and serves more than 3 million active users and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day.

The startup hosts “uncensored,” open source models on its own data centers, and routes queries to closed-source models, such as those by OpenAI or Anthropic. All user input is encrypted and unencrypted client-side, and routed through an external proxy before it is processed and returned, with no data stored on Venice’s own systems. It also provides end-to-end encryption on some models, though you have to pay for a subscription to get that feature.

The company is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million, its CEO Erik Voorhees (pictured above, in the center) told TechCrunch during an exclusive interview.

Understandably, investors have flocked to get a piece of that traction. Venice AI on Wednesday said it had raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others.

The overlap between Voorhees, Venice’s focus on privacy, and its new crypto investors is hard to miss, especially given the CEO’s background and past work. An early bitcoin advocate, Voorhees has founded a few crypto companies, including bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, and has long advocated in favor of preserving users’ privacy.

In fact, when a Wall Street Journal investigation accused ShapeShift, which initially didn’t require its users to identify themselves, of processing millions of suspect funds, Voorhees reportedly said: “I don’t think people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.”

He struck a similar note when asked how Venice AI thinks about offering access to AI models in light of recent cases of AI psychosis and resulting harm, saying his team treats their service as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform.”

“This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people,” he said. “I think it’s actually quite dangerous from a safety perspective, for the world to enter this next phase and have everyone be constantly watched. To me that is actually much more dangerous than any particular person asking a controversial question or something that might be considered bad.”

There’s a considerable focus on giving users agency, too. Users can freely choose from AI models that can generate text, images, audio, and video — all of which vary in their performance, quality, and the amount of censorship applied. The website prominently features several AI “characters” that you can customize and chat with, and the company proudly states it offers an “uncensored” experience.

“We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,” Voorhees said.

The founder said Venice also works on some open models’ system prompts to instruct them to answer more openly, though it doesn’t add any restrictions to the models.

Unsurprisingly, there are two crypto tokens associated with the effort. Venice launched a token called “VVV” in early January, in a bid to attract users, Voorhees said, and in August last year added another, called “DIEM.” Users can buy VVV and then stake it to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day that you can spend on Venice. However, Voorhees said only about 8% of the company’s users pay with crypto.

The founder credited the company’s growth to the good performance of the crypto tokens, though he said the strongest driver was getting close to feature parity with ChatGPT. “When we launched, we were very far away from what ChatGPT could do, but people would use us because it was private. And today, we’re very close to what ChatGPT can do […] so as we’ve closed that gap, it’s become an increasingly compelling alternative,” he said.

Looking forward, Venice AI wants to use the fresh cash to start buying GPUs and building its own data centers so it can stop leasing GPUs and increase its gross margins.