One line summary: adds certificate validation to the SSL module 
and programmer-level hooks to control how and whether 
certificate validation is performed.

Details:
The current SSL implementation in python goes through the 
motions of negotiating an SSL connection, but never validates the 
certificates exchanged.  This is like going through the motions of 
checking someone's photo id, but never making sure the picture 
matches the person you're talking to.  This patch fixes that.

This patch adds 3 module-level variables to the socket module, 
which get exposed iff ssl is built in.  These variables (ssl_ca_file, 
ssl_ca_path, and ssl_verify_level) provide programmer-level 
access to the certificate authorities database and to control what 
level of certificate verification is performed (by default, none, as is 
the current behavior).

If certificate verification is enabled, then one of the two certificate 
authority parameters must be set to  a valid certificate authority 
database or all certificate verification operations will fail.  I have 
an example certificate authority database (extracted from the Java 
keystore) that I can provide, but I'm not sure how to contribute 
that through the patch mechanism.

Cheers!
James Eagan