Planned obsolescence
--#--
Let Paul play for awhile. Run him against www.darkspell.com. 
Modify the parameters and action tag and hit a few <i>real</i>
sites. (Try the Burger King site that Pete cut his teeth on.)<br>
<br>
Just satisfy yourself that Paul can tackle HTTP posts like a real 
browser. Because we're about to perform an SSL transplant on Paul's 
guts -- the sockets.c module.
libraries.<br>
<br>
The OpenSSL API is idiosyncratic, opaque and poorly or non-documented. 
This is to say, don't expect to figure it out easily.  I won't claim 
to understand what's going on under the covers. But using some of the 
demo code in the latest distributions (particularly 
demos/bio/sconnect.c and demos/ssl/cli.cpp) and grepping through the 
program source, I can at least put together a reliable SSL3/TLS1 
connection.<br>
<br>
First we'll modify sockets.c to make an SSL handshake 
and connection over a TCP socket. OpenSSL has more recently defined 
a BIO input/output structure to handle SSL connections and data 
transfer. <br>
<br>
The BIO's advantage is that it performs <i>non-blocking</i> i/o. 
In other words, if the server on the other end is busy or not 
responding, the BIO's method won't just sit and wait. It will 
return and your code can chose to wait and try again or abandon 
the connection.<br>
<br>
For now, I'll just cover a simple SSL protocol on top of a standard 
TCP/IP socket. Perhaps at a later date we'll get into BIO's.
<br>