Ciphers

When curl connects to a TLS server, it negotiates how to speak the protocol and that negotiation involves several parameters and variables that both parties need to agree to. One of the parameters is which cryptography algorithms to use, the so called cipher. Over time, security researchers figure out flaws and weaknesses in existing ciphers and they are gradually phased out over time.

Using the verbose option, -v, you can get information about which cipher and TLS version are negotiated. By using the --ciphers option, you can change what cipher to prefer in the negotiation, but mind you, this is a power feature that takes knowledge to know how to use in ways that do not just make things worse.