After pushing the changes for Issue20939, many of the buildbots started experiencing the test_fileno failure using www.example.com.  The interesting thing is that not all of them do, including my primary development system (OS X 10.9) which is why I didn't see a problem during the initial testing.  On another dev system (Debian Linux on a VM), the test fails intermittently. So, yes, something funky *is* going on.  One obvious difference is that the read from www.python.org returns 44000+ byes while www.example.com returns only 162 bytes.  There could be a race condition with the TCP connection close.  I've temporarily changed the test to use www.google.com pending resolution. Thanks for the report and investigation, Daniel.