diff --git a/R/assembly-utils.R b/R/assembly-utils.R
index 7d9c4f3..1073d2f 100644
--- a/R/assembly-utils.R
+++ b/R/assembly-utils.R
@@ -218,7 +218,9 @@
                   "AssignedMoleculeLocationOrType", "GenBankAccn",
                   "Relationship", "RefSeqAccn", "AssemblyUnit" , 
                   "SequenceLength", "UCSCStyleName")
-    read.table(url, sep="\t", col.names=colnames, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
+    destfile <- tempfile()
+    download.file(url, destfile, quiet=TRUE)
+    read.table(destfile, sep="\t", col.names=colnames, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
 }
 
 ### See .normarg_assembly_accession() for how 'assembly_accession' can be
diff --git a/R/utils.R b/R/utils.R
index eecbc63..9c14e0f 100644
--- a/R/utils.R
+++ b/R/utils.R
@@ -51,11 +51,22 @@ mergeNamedAtomicVectors <- function(x, y, what=c("key", "values"))
 list_ftp_dir <- function(url)
 {
     doc <- getURL(url)  # from RCurl package
-    listing <- strsplit(doc, "\n", fixed=TRUE)[[1L]]
-    ## Keep field no. 8 only
-    pattern <- paste(c("^", rep.int("[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+", 8L)),
-                     collapse="")
-    listing <- sub(pattern, "", listing)
-    sub("[[:space:]].*$", "", listing)
+    if (grepl("HTML listing generated by Squid", doc) == FALSE) {
+        # Normal directory listing (text format)
+        listing <- strsplit(doc, "\n", fixed=TRUE)[[1L]]
+        ## Keep field no. 8 only
+        pattern <- paste(c("^", rep.int("[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+", 8L)),
+                         collapse="")
+        listing <- sub(pattern, "", listing)
+        listing <- sub("[[:space:]].*$", "", listing)
+    } else {
+        # Squid proxy directory listing (HTML format)
+        m <- gregexpr("HREF=\"([^./][^/\"]*)", doc, perl=TRUE)
+        l <- regmatches(doc, m)
+        l2 <- unlist(lapply(l, function(x) sub("HREF=\\\"", "", x)))
+        listing <- l2[c(TRUE, FALSE)] # select every other element
+    }
+    print(listing)
+    listing
 }