There seems to be no way to connect to a SPARQL endpoint on a server that is protected by basic authentification.
The standard way of passing on the userid and password in the url, .e.g http://userid:password@somedomain.com/path does not work, and there is no possibility to specify the userid and password otherwise.
This prevents any use of the library for connecting to a non-public SPARQL endpoint.
(This is for version 0.9.6 but this group cannot be selected in the issue form)