homepage

I had converted some code for a scraper from 2.7.3 to 3.3.0 on Windows 7 and suddenly the code stopped working. Now the https fetch results in:
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "D:\Users\Phil\Desktop\demo.py", line 67, in <module>
 page=getWebData()
 File "D:\Users\Phil\Desktop\demo.py", line 59, in getWebData
 response=urllib.request.urlopen(req, cadefault=False)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 160, in urlopen
 return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 473, in open
 response = self._open(req, data)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 491, in _open
 '_open', req)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 451, in _call_chain
 result = func(*args)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 1287, in https_open
 context=self._context, check_hostname=self._check_hostname)
 File "D:\Program Files\Python33\lib\urllib\request.py", line 1255, in do_open
 raise URLError(err)
urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [WinError 10054] An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host>
 
I have run Wireshark using Python 2.7.3 and Python 3.3.0 (see attached files)

You will notice that in the Python 3.3.0 version after packet 54 (Client Hello), there seems to be no response from the server.
Today, I was able to verify that the code worked under Python 3.2.3.

Well, the first difference that jumps out is that with python 2.7, the protocol used is SSLv2, whereas it's bare SSL on Python 3.3.0.
But another interesting thing is the presence, in Python 2.3, of many extenstions (elliptic_curves, heartbeat, server_name, etc).
It's likely that the server doesn't support one of these extensions (but I guess it should answer accordingly instead of ignoring the hello).

Your script works for me under Linux with Python 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4.
Perhaps the problem has to do with the version of OpenSSL that we package Windows binaries with? My OpenSSL version here (as given by ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION) is 'OpenSSL 1.0.0d 8 Feb 2011'.

It looks like we use OpenSSL 1.0.1c for Python 3.3 Windows builds, which would explain the different Client Hello. In your capture, the client identifies itself as TLS 1.2, while on my Linux box it's TLS 1.0.
I'm uploading the decoded protocol tree of the two handshakes.

Note that you could work around the issue by forcing a lower SSL version:
 ssl_context = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv3)
 opener = urllib.request.build_opener(
 urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj), 
 urllib.request.HTTPSHandler(context=ssl_context))
 urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
(I would suggest doing this only for this particular HTTPS site, not globally, since using a lower SSL version may make the exchanges potentially less secure)

On Windows 3.4.2 ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION is 'OpenSSL 1.0.1i 6 Aug 2014' and 3.5 is currently being built with 1.0.1l so is there anything that our windows developers need to do here with 3.3?

Python 3.3 no longer receives Windows releases, so closing this issue as out of date. Phil, if the issue persists in a newer Python version, please re-report.