My home town's a tourist mecca, but visitors often get lost in San Francisco--narrow streets, steep hills that block cellphone signals and navigation apps. But now tourists can load the Mindmap--brainware to guide them around, and translate languages too. Why tap away at an app as it struggles to consult the cloud, when you can keep the guide safe in your brain?

Too bad the Mindmap has a nasty piece of malware hid in the code. Makes the infected vote for reactionaries and poisons their relationships with anyone liberal or even conservative--only fascists are legit! Somewhere there's a little Hitler building followers--one brain at a time.

A tall girl I know caught it--that's how my friends learned about it. Not in the news. The brainware developers have deep pockets, and have hushed up their embarrassing boo-boo--so far.

I'm glad to be a local with a naturally learned map in my head and reasonable language skills; I never needed to load that brainware.

But I don't have to BE infected to suffer from the malware's effects. Neither do you. It's already widespread enough to poison public spaces--lone ranters, little gangs of thugs... and it'll get worse. How long till we get torchlit rallies, beatings, murders?

It has to be stopped. How?

NOTE IN THE MORNING

• Fascist brainwashing: that's how I see Trump's inflammatory speech and tweets.
• But why malware, why the web invading us? The furor over data harvesting, I guess. But why so extreme, and why tonight? Didn't see any news that'd explain this.

I'm alone in our house when four big intimidating white men knock on our front door. Two claim to be local cops, two claim to be FBI agents investigating identity thefts. They want to know the names of everyone here, and all about our wifi and network names and web service.

They look and sound to me like con men trying to commit identify theft--it's an obvious scam, just print up some plausible-looking pieces of paper and knock on doors till you find someone who'll give you their info. I say "Sorry, I don't believe you" and call the cops.

The San Francisco police operator says, sounding surprised herself, "Two of our officers are at your address. Those guys are real." There are FBI agents at my door.

Now that I know they're not a con, I open the door again, verify who lives here (half the names are wrong), answer questions... and ask a few of my own. The G-men say our web provider Comcast told them that an extensive Craigslist business using fake identities and issuing personal threats and abuse was at our address! See, there were just too many user names in our (shared, 6-person co-operative) house. We're not average. We must be criminals.

Comcast also said this criminal behavior continued yesterday, when most of us were out of town for the holidays and the rest weren't on the web. It CAN'T be us.

So... either a neighbor cracked our wifi password, or some sleazeballs in Moscow (Russia or Idaho, take your pick) spoofed their web address, hid it behind ours... fooling Comcast. No surprise, given their general incompetence. We didn't choose Comcast--we live on a hill where they've had a total monopoly for years.

But is that true NOW? New firms start every week. Time to shop around again...

NEXT MONTH

The FBI never returned.

We dumped Comcast for Monkeybrains--crashfree, cheaper, and they keep your web data private. Love 'em. A neighbor loves Sonic, which keeps your data private too. The monopoly's cracking.

Dump Comcast, folks! They don't just sell your data--they lie about you. To the Feds.

Talk about malware.

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