I believe that in most common distributions, both curl and wget will be supplied with ca-certificates out of the box. e.g > $ dig +short ssl.example.com > 12

I believe that in most common distributions, both curl and wget will be supplied with ca-certificates out of the box. e.g > $ dig +short ssl.example.com > 123.456.789.012 > $ curl -I https://123.456.789.012/foo.bar https://123.456.789.012/foo.bar > curl: (51) SSL: certificate subject name 'ssl.example.com' > does not match target host name '123.456.789.012' Besides that, he makes several good points which I think should speak for themselves.