With friends like this . . .

For years I've relied on Watch That Page to let me know when Regional Transit changes the content of its front page.  It is a free service and works well on pages such as RT's that don't offer RSS news feeds.

Anyway, the other day I was alerted to a new link on RT's home page.

I'll discuss the survey later (click on the link and let them know your opinion) but since it has been several years since I paid attention to things RT, I decided to find out who, exactly, are these "Friends of Light Rail and Transit.

A quick Google search located www.friendsoflightrail.org, but don't go there without wearing some protection.

With friends like this . . .

That's not fair. As a web developer I know what it is like to get hacked. It's like having your house burgled. You've been violated.

I've had two sites I maintained suddenly sprout ads for prescription drugs. One of the attacks was impressively sneaky. The ads only displayed when a search engine bot visited. "Regular" visitors didn't see the ads. More than 20,000 individual pages were uploaded by the hacker and carefully indexed by Google (and I suppose other search engines). I didn't know the site was hacked until a guy contacted me to let me know.

The Friends of Light Rail and Transit hack is more blatant. Those links at the bottom of the page are an obvious indication that something is amiss. I have to assume that the friends don't have a lot of friends visiting to let them know they have been hacked.

I sent a note off to the contact email address last week. No response.