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.
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!