For quite a long while search engines would return amazing results when you searched for
Dsc-0001.jpg
And so on, perhaps with some variations based on camera model. People uploaded their DCIM folders to their homedirs which were sometimes exposed to the web. You’d see so much private stuff this way.
Just tried and it appears such functionality has been removed from Google, because of course it has.
Reminds me of how you used to be able to control various unsecured IP security cams by typing part of the URL that is common among them into Google.
I remember stumbling upon some random office building in China and was able to fully control every camera in the place. I never did anything beyond pan them around a bit—and nobody ever reacted to my antics—so I guess the camera movements either weren’t very obvious or staff was just used to being watched by management/random people.
In the 90s and early 00’s it was really common for Universities (for their students and professors) to arrange Unix based shell accounts for email and storage.
The Apache http server was easily configured to allow per user websites and this was commonly done to give everyone a website. They looked something like a “www.example.com/~username” URL which mapped to a public_html folder inside the user’s home directory. Apache would serve up any files or html that lived inside to the public.
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For quite a long while search engines would return amazing results when you searched for
Dsc-0001.jpg
And so on, perhaps with some variations based on camera model. People uploaded their DCIM folders to their homedirs which were sometimes exposed to the web. You’d see so much private stuff this way.
Just tried and it appears such functionality has been removed from Google, because of course it has.
Reminds me of how you used to be able to control various unsecured IP security cams by typing part of the URL that is common among them into Google.
I remember stumbling upon some random office building in China and was able to fully control every camera in the place. I never did anything beyond pan them around a bit—and nobody ever reacted to my antics—so I guess the camera movements either weren’t very obvious or staff was just used to being watched by management/random people.
I bet Google themselves can still see them though, for training their AI.
It looks like you can still search for private directories with specific keywords.
Why were their homedirs exposed to the web?
In the 90s and early 00’s it was really common for Universities (for their students and professors) to arrange Unix based shell accounts for email and storage.
The Apache http server was easily configured to allow per user websites and this was commonly done to give everyone a website. They looked something like a “www.example.com/~username” URL which mapped to a public_html folder inside the user’s home directory. Apache would serve up any files or html that lived inside to the public.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/howto/public_html.html
At the time, a lot of people didn’t worry about anyone finding their obscure files, so put them there freely for family and friends.
Wild times!
Nostalgia in a bottle.
Sad, you can still do this with youtube for the time being
Amazing.
Fantastic, that vid has 78 views as of now, I’m guessing 76 of them from today hahaha
It’s down to 70 views for me. Someone’s been disrupting the space-time continuum.