I suppose, that most of you know, how bad is to skip peer verification when accessing resources through SSL. There is a nice article dealing with the topic from the PHP perspective - Insufficient Transport Layer Security (HTTPS, TLS and SSL). Generally, the purpose of SSL is to secure the connection itself through encryption and also to provide authentication of the communicating peers. That means, data are not only sent through an encrypted channel, but also to the right target. To verify the remote host, you need to check, if the certificate it presents to you is signed by a trusted certification authority.
