Steven Levy is writing what I would consider historical fiction, but let's pretend his story is true. Context matters. Whether passwords are necessary depends

Steven Levy is writing what I would consider historical fiction, but let's pretend his story is true. Context matters. Whether passwords are necessary depends on context. Many family computers don't have accounts or passwords, and it works fine for the same reasons most houses don't have bedroom doors which lock. People are trusted to not be bad actors. The early AI Lab was super-open, and it worked fine. Everyone knew each other, and there weren't (m)any bad actors. Part of the reason MIT CSAIL doesn't work as well is that it closed itself off. That's very different from a 2022-era computer facing the public internet with billions of potential attackers.