After some investigation, the error does occur because of the aforementioned changelog entry (SSLv2 weak ciphers are now disabled by default). To check it I just added the following line to newPySSLObject():

     SSL_CTX_set_cipher_list(self->ctx, "ALL");

Of course this isn't desirable: we shouldn't blindly enable weak ciphers. Instead we could simply add an argument to configure allowed ciphers, and use "ALL" in our tests. Or we could add a separate method to configure ciphers.

(this begs the question of whether this is suitable post-beta1)

What do you think?