diff --git a/INSTALL.txt b/INSTALL.txt
index ed59401..67006a6 100644
--- a/INSTALL.txt
+++ b/INSTALL.txt
@@ -5,12 +5,12 @@ To use Stage File Proxy, you must add variables to $conf in settings.php:
 REQUIRED:
 =========
 
-The origin website. 
+The origin website.
 
 $conf['stage_file_proxy_origin'] = 'http://example.com'; // no trailing slash
 
 If the site is using HTTP Basic Authentication (the browser popup for username
-and password) you can embed those in the url. Be sure to URL encode any 
+and password) you can embed those in the url. Be sure to URL encode any
 special characters:
 
 For a username of myusername and password letme&in the configuration would be:
@@ -46,14 +46,14 @@ files. This is useful for multisite installations where the sites directory
 contains different names for each url. If this is not set, it defaults to the
 same path as the local site (sites/default/files).
 
-$conf['stage_file_proxy_sslversion'] = 3;
+$conf['stage_file_proxy_sslversion'] = 'sslv3';
 
-Default is 3.
+Default is FALSE to disable. Can also be 'sslv2', 'tls' or 'sslv3'.
 
-CURL will try to figure out which ssl version to use, but if it fails to do that
-properly it can lead to getting an empty file and a 0 status code. The default is
-3 which seems relatively common, but if you get 0 byte files you can try changing
-it to 2.
+drupal_http_request will try to figure out which ssl version to use, but if it
+fails to do that properly it can lead to getting an empty file and a 0 status
+code. The default is FALSE since this relies on a core patch from this issue:
+http://drupal.org/node/1879970
 
 DRUSH USERS
 ===========
diff --git a/stage_file_proxy.module b/stage_file_proxy.module
index 2f29efe..3d389d7 100644
--- a/stage_file_proxy.module
+++ b/stage_file_proxy.module
@@ -64,7 +64,12 @@ function _stage_file_proxy_fetch($server, $remote_file_dir, $relative_path) {
     }
   }
   $url = $server . '/' . drupal_encode_path($remote_dir_path . '/' . $filename);
-  $response = drupal_http_request($url);
+  if (variable_get('stage_file_proxy_sslversion', FALSE)) {
+    $response = drupal_http_request($url, array('ssl_version' => variable_get('stage_file_proxy_sslversion', 'sslv3')));
+  }
+  else {
+    $response = drupal_http_request($url);
+  }
   if ($response->code == 200) {
     file_put_contents($file_dir . '/' . $relative_path, $response->data);
     return TRUE;