Mad Magazine had long survived as the smart-aleck spawn of the age of mass media — existing solely to subvert established authorities. Its demise reflects the demise of establishment itself. We now live in a time when everyone's a rebel, from the president of the United States on down.

In recent years, shopping recommendation verticals have grown so numerous that they’ve become as hard to parse as the vast amount of product options they were meant to simplify. Now sites like Wirecutter, The Strategist and Reviewed have come to define a new era of editorial-minded shopping and have become a central part of the online economy.

Veles, Macedonia, has become a home for websites that publish misleading and inflammatory political articles targeted at US readers. One former writer describes her job of creating semi-plagiarised copies of articles originally published on US extreme right-wing publications, so that her boss could serve them back to unsuspecting Americans for Google ad revenue.

The number of Facebook users who have joined an event pledging to raid Area 51 on September 20 has now reached 1.2 million people. It’s unclear how serious the event’s organizers really are about the invasion, but the number of "alien hunters" who have expressed interested is now equivalent to the world's fouth-largest army. 

At VidCon 2019, the largest convention for YouTube and Instagram influencers, one kid dressed up in cosplay as "apology kid" — a melange of different expressions of regret made by social media celebrities like Logan Paul — who, after sobbing, reminded his viewers to subscribe and like the video for a chance to win a $1,000 gift-card giveaway.

Newly melded media conglomerates and powerful Silicon Valley players, including Apple, are gearing up to battle Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu with their own streaming services. PCMag breaks down the escalating war for original content and the tectonic shifts in an industry that's straddling the media, tech, and entertainment worlds.

Yoox Net-a-Porter CEO and chairman Federico Marchetti outlines his plans to integrate data into every part of the business by developing predictive models and interfaces to bolster the performance of its buyers and personal shoppers.

In collaboration with IBM Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, now offers its students studying Chinese another option: a 360-degree virtual environment equipped with different AI capabilities to respond to them in real time. Students will learn the language by ordering food or haggling with street vendors on a virtual Beijing street.

• Big innovations can come from simple technological advancements.
• Corporations who hack hackers back could lead to dangerous outcomes.
• Food-delivery robots have arrived, but the data their cameras collect is the real development to watch. 
• Autonomous vehicles are further from hitting the roads than most think.