Found it.

The original problem with lynda.com:

 A - it doesn't like TLSv1 negotiations so you have to enforce SSLv3 with -3 _and_

 B - it insists on an insecure cipher algorithm which curl disables these days so you have to override that. Appending "--ciphers ALL" makes it work.

The second case, cbtnuggets.com only suffers from case B, insisting on insecure ciphers.

I'm not convinced this is a bug in curl. These sites use insecure ciphers and curl is now actively helping out by not playing along without us noticing.

---
** [bugs:#1329] curl: (35) Unknown SSL protocol error on libcurl/7.35.0**
**Status:** open-confirmed
**Created:** Wed Jan 29, 2014 05:07 PM UTC by S Adrian
**Last Updated:** Tue Feb 04, 2014 03:46 PM UTC
**Owner:** Daniel Stenberg
$ curl https://www.lynda.com/ -v
Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
Trying 69.20.127.243...
Connected to www.lynda.com (69.20.127.243) port 443 (#0)
successfully set certificate verify locations:
CAfile: none
CApath: /etc/ssl/certs SSLv3, TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to www.lynda.com:443 
Closing connection 0
curl: (35) Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to www.lynda.com:443
$ curl -V
curl 7.27.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.35.0 OpenSSL/1.0.1f zlib/1.2.8 librtmp/2.3
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps pop3 pop3s rtmp rtsp smtp smtps telnet tftp 
Features: AsynchDNS IPv6 Largefile NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz TLS-SRP
---
Sent from sourceforge.net because curl-tracker@cool.haxx.se is subscribed to https://sourceforge.net/p/curl/bugs/
To unsubscribe from further messages, a project admin can change settings at https://sourceforge.net/p/curl/admin/bugs/options.  Or, if this is a mailing list, you can unsubscribe from the mailing list.