If for some sad reason you're stuck using perl+LWP 5.8 on RHEL 6, here's how to make HTTPS actually secure

lwp-monkeypatch.pl

# as far as I can tell the SSL_CERT_* environment variables are not
# respected, and the SSL_ca_path argument doesn't work at all. Yay.

sub lwp_58_extra_sock_opts {
  # turn on peer verification without subclassing LWP::Protocol::https
  use IO::Socket::SSL;

  return (
    SSL_verify_mode => IO::Socket::SSL::SSL_VERIFY_PEER,
    SSL_ca_file     => '/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt',
    SSL_version     => 'TLSv1',
  )
}

local *LWP::Protocol::https::_extra_sock_opts = \&lwp_58_extra_sock_opts
  if $LWP::UserAgent::VERSION < 6;
  
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;  # &c