I tried to run

$pip install --upgrade --allow-insecure setuptools

but it doesn't seem to work? is my syntax wrong?

this is on ubuntu 13.10 I need --allow-insecure as I haven't been able to the get the corporate proxy SSL certificates yet so I always get certificate verify failed errors.

I get this error:

You must give at least one requirement to install (see "pip help install")

The current syntax is to use --trusted-host, to allow insecure downloads of all packages from a specific host or hosts.

pip install setuptools --trusted-host pypi.org --trusted-host files.pythonhosted.org

If you specify a custom PyPI repository either via a pip.conf or --index-url my.own.pypi.repo, you'll want to use your own repo instead of pypi.org.