4 ms·

Defaults matter immensely for two reasons: very few people ever bother to change them unless a specific, user visible problem is occuring due to the first poi

by throwaway2048 9y ago

Defaults matter immensely for two reasons: very few people ever bother to change them unless a specific, user visible problem is occuring due to the first point, non-defaults receive little or no testing, and are highly likely to be broken, and stay broken because the catch 22 of nobody cares so its broken, and because its broken nobody cares. Off by default is very much the status of mitigation technologies in FreeBSD atm, its a shame that the author did not touch on this as its one area OpenBSD is miles ahead of FreeBSD in particular (mitigations on by default, breakage exposed and fixed due to it, they remain mostly unusable on FreeBSD due to them).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
X86BSD 9y ago
It’s worth also mentioning that as far as I am aware the OpenBSD folks also almost universally eat their own dog food. Most of not all the developers run -current. The bleeding edge. So they can find and fix any issues. I’m not sure how many of the other developers for FreeBSD or NetBSD do that.
- nbsd4lyfe 9y ago
  I'm a netbsd developer and run netbsd. I think most active netbsd developers do. a lot of former netbsd developers are still hanging around and contributing to pkgsrc while using it on OS X or linux, I don't think that's a thing to be ashamed of.
foodstances 9y ago
To the "X86BSD" user who commented here: you are shadow banned so your comments are showing up as dead by default so most users can't see or reply to them. Just thought you should know.
- fao_ 9y ago
  For the record, if you see a shadow banned comment that shouldn't be shadowbanned, you can click on the timestamp and then click "vouch". I don't know if there are karma restrictions to this, though.
  - andrewjw 9y ago
    Sorry for OT, are there docs for what karma requirements are for what actions?
    - jwilk 9y ago
      Unless something changed since 2015, you need karma ≥ 30 to vouch or flag things, and > 500 to downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 (Not quite "docs", but hopefully better than nothing!)
atmosx 9y ago
> Defaults matter immensely I would bet that this is not the case for NetBSD users. I'm pretty sure most of them change the defaults and have a pretty good of what's running where. I'm not insinuating that all of them are security researchers, but to the very least are above-average UNIX users.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

X86BSD 9y ago

It’s worth also mentioning that as far as I am aware the OpenBSD folks also almost universally eat their own dog food. Most of not all the developers run -current. The bleeding edge. So they can find and fix any issues. I’m not sure how many of the other developers for FreeBSD or NetBSD do that.

nbsd4lyfe 9y ago
I'm a netbsd developer and run netbsd. I think most active netbsd developers do. a lot of former netbsd developers are still hanging around and contributing to pkgsrc while using it on OS X or linux, I don't think that's a thing to be ashamed of.

foodstances 9y ago

To the "X86BSD" user who commented here: you are shadow banned so your comments are showing up as dead by default so most users can't see or reply to them. Just thought you should know.

fao_ 9y ago
For the record, if you see a shadow banned comment that shouldn't be shadowbanned, you can click on the timestamp and then click "vouch". I don't know if there are karma restrictions to this, though.
- andrewjw 9y ago
  Sorry for OT, are there docs for what karma requirements are for what actions?
  - jwilk 9y ago
    Unless something changed since 2015, you need karma ≥ 30 to vouch or flag things, and > 500 to downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512 (Not quite "docs", but hopefully better than nothing!)

atmosx 9y ago

> Defaults matter immensely I would bet that this is not the case for NetBSD users. I'm pretty sure most of them change the defaults and have a pretty good of what's running where. I'm not insinuating that all of them are security researchers, but to the very least are above-average UNIX users.