Warning, do not do this in production, you are disabling SSL completely this way.
If you really don’t want the additional security of using certificate verification, and can upgrade to Ruby 1.9.3p327+, you can pass the ssl_verify_mode option to the open method. Here for example is how I’m doing it:
request_uri=URI.parse('myuri?that_has=params&encoded=in_it&optionally=1')
# The params incidentally are available as a String, via request_uri.query
output = open(request_uri, {ssl_verify_mode: OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE})
obj = JSON.parse output.readlines.join("")