App Smart: Basic Apps for Your New Smartphone or Tablet

Don’t panic. Here’s a selection of great, basic apps to get you going.

Let’s start with some games. Sky Gamblers: Cold War from Atypical Games has 3-D graphics so impressive that it is almost as if you have a game console in a device you can put in your pocket. This $5 iPhone or iPad game puts you in the cockpit of a number of aircraft from the Cold War era. You steer by turning your device in the air, and control various systems and weapons by tapping on icons or swiping on the screen. The game has dramatic missions, and is great fun. It’s also an ideal app to show off the power of your new device to a friend.

On Android a similar game is Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy, from the makers Namco-Bandai. It also has good graphics and the same sort of complex gameplay. It’s free, although it costs up to $3 to unlock different missions and aircraft. There also is Air Supremacy on iOS for $1, but I feel the Cold War version is better.

For an alternative to a war-themed game, try Infinity Blade 3 on iOS and Dragonslayer on Android. These are fantasy games with amazing 3-D graphics that place you on an adventure in a mystical land with just your wits and sword skills to save you. Infinity Blade 3, which is also perhaps the most graphically wonderful game you’ll see on an iOS device, costs $3. Dragonslayer is free on Android.

You probably have heard of Angry Birds, a wonderfully odd puzzle game where you catapult moody avians to destroy buildings made by evil pigs. The latest, Angry Birds Star Wars 2, is free on both iOS and Android and is hilarious to play. Its puzzles and hidden levels have kept me amused for too many hours to count. There is a Windows 8 version too that will cost you a dollar.

For a different puzzler, check out Candy Crush Saga, which has been downloaded half a billion times. It’s a bit like the classic Tetris, with cute graphics and simple but addictive gameplay. It’s free on iOS and Android.

With social networking apps you can experience the thrill of sharing news or photos or even video about what you’re up to with the world in real time. Twitter (free on iOS, Android, Windows Phone), Facebook (free on iOS, Android and Windows) and Instagram (free on iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8) are all worth checking out. Again, these apps come with a warning — you may use them much more than you expected.

But don’t forget that smartphones and tablets have more uses than merely to gossip or play games. How about using them to get you from A to B? Waze is a powerful GPS app to try. It replaces that old device that you used to suction onto your car’s windshield with a modern mapping system that is constantly improved by its community of users.

As well as the usual tricks of showing a map and speaking turn-by-turn directions, Waze offers real-time traffic data and alerts for incidents like traffic jams or accidents. The app has some quirks, like requiring a network connection for live data, thus eating up your mobile data allowance, and its cutesy graphics may not tickle your fancy. But it is free, and available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

For more real-time data for the world around you, download Layar or Junaio to tap into some of the same “augmented reality” vibe that Google’s Glass headset is championing. These apps turn your device into a digital window.

You hold your device up and the screen will show a view through the camera’s lens. Superimposed on top of this view is all sorts of additional data you select from a library of different “layers,” including information like the identity of boats you can see on the ocean, or photos that Twitter users nearby have shared.

Layar (iOS, Android) and Junaio (iOS, Android) are free and may amaze you with the amount of location information you can find within moments. But this technology is quite new, so be prepared for a bit of a learning curve with the apps and occasionally unreliable performance.

Finally, check out the amazing power of Shazam. This app listens to music you hear in public, as you sit in a coffee shop, for example, and automatically identifies the tune for you. It’s magical to see in action, and it even offers links to buy the music if you really like it. Shazam is free on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

These, of course, are just the beginning. There are many thousands more out there — many free. Do some of your own exploring, and you’ll find apps for everything. Just be careful about spending surprising amounts of money on in-app purchases, particularly in games.

QUICK CALL

Cut the Rope 2, the sequel to the first runaway hit, is new for $1 on iOS. It’s a sort of puzzle game with timing and physics-based elements, and it’s great.

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

This undated photo released by the United States government shows the National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md.

This article has been reported in partnership among The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica based on documents obtained by The Guardian. For The Guardian: James Ball, Julian Borger, Glenn Greenwald. For The New York Times: Nicole Perlroth, Scott Shane. For ProPublica: Jeff Larson.

CITING EFFORTS TO EXPLOIT WEB James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong. “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world. The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant. But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology. N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission. If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by leaders of Al Qaeda about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus. If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

John Markoff contributed reporting.

Bits Blog: Facebook Discloses Basic Data on Law-Enforcement Requests

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press A sign outside of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The company on Friday disclosed information about government requests for data, the vast majority of which did not pertain to national security matters.

12:10 a.m. Saturday, June 15, 2013 | Updated Added Microsoft’s release of more data on Friday night.

Facebook on Friday disclosed for the first time how many requests for data about its 1.1 billion users it had gotten from law enforcement authorities in the United States.

The social networking company said that in the last six months of 2012, it had 9,000 to 10,000 requests for information about its users from local, state and federal agencies. Those requests covered 18,000 to 19,000 user accounts.

“These requests run the gamut — from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat,” the company’s general counsel, Ted Ullyot, said in a blog post disclosing the data.

Facebook said it was legally prohibited from saying how many of the data requests were related to national security. But generally speaking, the vast majority of the law-enforcement data requests received by tech companies are for other matters, like local criminal cases.

Facebook’s disclosure comes after negotiations with the federal government that began after the first news reports a week ago about the National Security Agency’s secret Prism surveillance program. Those reports revealed that a number of American Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, had secretly provided data about foreigners to the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The tech companies have also secretly provided data to the F.B.I. under National Security Letters, which the government uses to gather information about Americans.

Under federal law, companies generally cannot disclose even the existence of national security data requests they receive. But in recent days, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been pressing the government for permission to share more information.

“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) – which until now no company has been permitted to do,” Mr. Ullyot wrote. “As of today, the government will only authorize us to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range. This is progress, but we’re continuing to push for even more transparency.”

Google had previously published a transparency report that included N.S.L. but not FISA data requests. Microsoft’s recent transparency report similarly excluded FISA requests but included National Security Letters.

Late Friday, after Facebook’s data release, Microsoft provided similar information about requests for data that it had received from law enforcement at all levels of government.

For the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from governmental entities in the United States, the company’s deputy general counsel, John Frank, said in a statement.

“We have not received any national security orders of the type that Verizon was reported to have received that required Verizon to provide business records about U.S. customers,” Mr. Frank said.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Microsoft's transparency report. It included National Security Letters requests, but excluded FISA requests. It did not exclude both types of national security requests.

Competition Designed to Spread Basic Technologies

That changed after the directors of the school turned to a new technological tool to alert the authorities — and their watchdogs — to the problem. Shortly after they did so, the toilets, which had been out of order for months, were fixed.

“For us, it’s not just to show that there is a capacity in Africa to develop good applications,” said Daniel Annerose, chief executive of a mobile technology company in Dakar, called Manobi, which developed the reporting system, which lets teachers, students or parents report problems with sanitation facilities at more than 2,000 schools across Senegal.

The system, called mSchool, is one of three winners of a competition organized by the World Bank to identify promising solutions to address a striking discrepancy in access to high and low technologies in developing countries: Six billion of the seven billion people around the world have mobile phones, while only 4.5 billion have access to toilets, according to a recent United Nations report.

The winners of the Sanitation Hackathon, as the World Bank calls the project, are set to be honored on Friday in connection with the annual meetings of the bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund. The other honorees are Sun-Clean, a computer game developed by students at the University of Indonesia, which teaches children about good hygiene; and Taarifa, a Web application developed by programmers in Britain, Germany, the United States and Tanzania, which uses “open source” technology, interactive mapping and other features to help public officials track sanitation problems.

Because of the rapid spread of cellular phones, mobile technology has previously been used to address a variety of problems in the developing world, including access to financial services, health care information and education. But toilets were another matter.

“People don’t want to talk about poo,” said Jaehyang So, manager of the Water and Sanitation Program, a fund administered by the World Bank. “There’s the ick factor.”

In addition to the deaths and health problems, Ms. So said, poor sanitation causes a variety of other problems. In places where schools lack working toilets, many girls drop out once they begin menstruating because of a lack of privacy, she said, causing a form of educational discrimination.

“We were saying, ‘Isn’t this awful,”’ Ms. So said. “Then we decided to say, ‘What can we learn from the tech industry?’ Why is it that pretty much everyone who wants an iPhone can get one? How do they get this kind of rapid scale-up?”

Building on a process that had previously been employed to address problems in supplying clean water to people in poor areas, the World Bank turned its attention to sanitation. Over six months last year, it solicited ideas from experts in the field, as well as software developers. The process culminated in early December with the actual hackathon — two days in which more than 1,000 developers gathered in 40 cities worldwide to work on their projects.

The project has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and supported by companies like Nokia, the mobile phone maker, and organizations like Toilet Hackers, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and others who are seeking solutions to the problem of poor sanitation.

“It’s something that can have a little more impact than helping someone find the nearest bar or restaurant,” said Gary Gale, director of global community programs in the location and commerce division of Nokia, which works with the company’s mapping technology.

After the event in Washington, the winners of the hackathon are set to travel to Silicon Valley for meetings with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who are interested in the issue. The World Bank does not plan to invest in the projects, but hopes that others might.

“We would love it if Silicon Valley could take some of these applications and build them into sustainable businesses,” said Chris Vein, chief innovation officer for information and communications technology development at the bank. That way, he added, the projects could create jobs and economic growth, perhaps helping to ease the poverty that underlies poor sanitation.

John Kluge Jr., a New York venture capitalist who is a co-founder of Toilet Hackers, said mobile technology can help, but is “just one part of the equation.” If toilets are to be provided to more of the 2.5 billion people without them, new methods of financing — not just aid — will also be needed.

“Innovation isn’t just about technology and design,” Mr. Kluge said. “It’s also about the business model.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2013

An article on Friday about a World Bank competition aimed at solving sanitation problems in poor countries gave an incorrect operating base for John Kluge Jr., a venture capitalist who commented on the effort. He is based in New York, not in Silicon Valley.