I was trying to download a UCI ML dataset in R using the read.csv() but kept getting error "Error in file(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection In addition: Warning message: In file(file, "rt") : InternetOpenUrl failed: 'An error occurred in the secure channel support'"

download_data_from_url.r

# Apparently the problem lies in https. The function read.csv() in R fails at this. I tried RCurl's getURL() still same error.
# Then I tried fread() from library(data.table) and it worked.
# I give below a minimum reproducible example to download data from a https base webpage.

# load the adult dataset
library(data.table)
dt<- fread("https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/adult/adult.data",header = FALSE, sep=",")

head(dt)
   V1               V2     V3        V4 V5                 V6
1: 39        State-gov  77516 Bachelors 13      Never-married
2: 50 Self-emp-not-inc  83311 Bachelors 13 Married-civ-spouse
3: 38          Private 215646   HS-grad  9           Divorced
4: 53          Private 234721      11th  7 Married-civ-spouse
5: 28          Private 338409 Bachelors 13 Married-civ-spouse
6: 37          Private 284582   Masters 14 Married-civ-spouse
                  V7            V8    V9    V10  V11 V12 V13
1:      Adm-clerical Not-in-family White   Male 2174   0  40
2:   Exec-managerial       Husband White   Male    0   0  13
3: Handlers-cleaners Not-in-family White   Male    0   0  40
4: Handlers-cleaners       Husband Black   Male    0   0  40
5:    Prof-specialty          Wife Black Female    0   0  40
6:   Exec-managerial          Wife White Female    0   0  40
             V14   V15
1: United-States <=50K
2: United-States <=50K
3: United-States <=50K
4: United-States <=50K
5:          Cuba <=50K
6: United-States <=50K