The article is somewhat out of date, the default is now to verify (though you can turn it off if you need to). A lot is changing with PHP, and people aren't keeping up.
You mean in the version that's not properly released or anywhere close to production ready? 5.5 still defaults to not verifying according to the documentation.
The next article will cover the changes in 5.6 and why you don't need to set those ctx opts any more (and a few more you might want to set instead)