Ubuntu not letting me download using anything but apt-get

In order to know which protocol apt-get is using, you can have a look at the file /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages can be coming from a cd-rom, a ftp server, a http server, etc.

Have you tried opening a webpage with telnet to have a look at the entire HTTP response? For instance:

$ telnet www.google.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

The problem partly had to do with proxy settings. Now, I had set the proxy environment variable

export http_proxy="http://IP ADDRESS:PORT"

before with no luck, but after restarting the computer, several other solutions failed because I didn't add the environment variable again. I was attempting to clone the git repository in /var/local/git. After a long time of not being able to do what I want, I started trying random solutions, and eventually tried cloning the git repository to /home/myusername/git. To my surprise, the repo started downloading! So, what was the difference?

I performed a ls -la on /var/local/git and /home/myusername/git, and the results were

>>$ ls -la /var/local/git/
total 12
drwxr-sr-x 3 root staff 4096 2010-08-18 09:17 .
drwxrwsr-x 5 root staff 4096 2010-07-07 15:27 ..
drwxrwxr-x 4 root root  4096 2010-08-14 13:59 symfony
>>$ ls -la /home/myusername/git
total 432
drwxr-xr-x  3 myusername myusername 4096 2010-08-18 09:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 29 myusername myusername 4096 2010-08-18 09:18 ..
drwxr-xr-x  5 myusername myusername 4096 2010-08-18 09:21 symfony

So, it turns out, I guess this is a lesson on permissions. I'm guessing the problem had something to do with the 's' permission in /var/local/git, but from what I've read I cannot tell why that would be the cause of my problems.

Does anyone know if this is a legit answer, or does it sound like something else was at work here?