netcurl-6.1 is three tasks from an official release. The library is no longer dependent of curl, despite the name. If there is no curl-driver available on the used php-platform it will automatically try to fail over to the built in stream-support, via the binary safe method file_get_contents. The fopen/fread-variant has been skipped, at least in the first release, as it works in a similar way to file_get_contents. And it's as described not binary safe.