I’m fairly new to FreeBSD; I've been using it for various small projects off and on since 9.x. I also previously worked for MIT for over a dozen years and worke

I’m fairly new to FreeBSD; I've been using it for various small projects off and on since 9.x. I also previously worked for MIT for over a dozen years and worked fairly closely with network security colleagues. To me, the attitude of we're not going to change the defaults the neckbeards cut their teeth on 20 years ago regardless of the insane threat environment we exist in today and if you get hacked, owned or worse, it's your own damn fault for not knowing all of the tweaks that could have saved your ass that we decided not to make defaults even if they are defaults upstream is the height of Unix elitism IMHO. In the world we live in, having defaults stay the same for the sake of not inconveniencing people who already know better is incredibly shortsighted. And it makes it way more difficult for newbies who don't have time to cobble together best practices from all the relevant IRC chat rooms, email lists and blog posts to learn FreeBSD’s best practices. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have a default install of FreeBSD that allows users new to the platform and who are looking around and kicking the tires that also allows users to shoot themselves in the foot unnecessarily. Thanks to the author’a article, I now disable the default settings for OpenSSH, use OpenNTPD, encrypt swap and build everything I can against libressl-devel. The fact that so many of what are mostly common sense proposed defaults are perceived as breaking some kind of FreeBSD oath of obfuscation doesn't help grow the FreeBSD community in the long run. That's something to also consider.