I found a solution for https: http://unitstep.net/blog/2009/05/05/using-curl-in-php-to-access-https-ssltls-protected-sites/ basically in your if clause on row 448 I removed
$respNum = ;
with the content of the else clause and added
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
It works now, but I get "forbidden" or "not found" on some https-links that deliver PDF-documents, not HTML pages.