Syria Rebels Find Skype Useful, but Dangers Lurk

When Syria’s Internet service disappeared Thursday, government officials first blamed rebel attacks. Activist groups blamed the government and viewed the blackout as a sign that troops would violently clamp down on rebels.

But having dealt with periodic outages for more than a year, the opposition had anticipated a full shutdown of Syria’s Internet service providers. To prepare, they have spent months smuggling communications equipment like mobile handsets and portable satellite phones into the country.

“We’re very well equipped here,” said Albaraa Abdul Rahman, 27, an activist in Saqba, a poor suburb 20 minutes outside Damascus. He said he was in touch with an expert in Homs who helped connect his office and 10 others like it in and around Damascus.

Using the connection, the activists in Saqba talked to rebel fighters on Skype and relayed to overseas activists details about clashes with government forces. A video showed the rebels’ bare-bones room, four battery backups that could power a laptop for eight hours and a generator set up on a balcony.

For months, rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have used Skype, a peer-to-peer Internet communication system, to organize and talk to outside news organizations and activists. A few days ago, Jad al-Yamani, an activist in Homs, sent a message to rebel fighters that tanks were moving toward a government checkpoint.

He notified the other fighters so that they could go observe the checkpoint. “Through Skype you know how the army moves or can stop it,” Mr. Yamani said.

On Friday, Dawoud Sleiman, 39, a member of the antigovernment Ahrar al-Shamal Battalion, part of the Free Syrian Army, reached out to other members of the rebel group. They were set up at the government’s Wadi Aldaif military base in Idlib, a province near the Turkish border that has seen heavy fighting, and connected to Skype via satellite Internet service.

Mr. Sleiman, who is based in Turkey, said the Free Syrian Army stopped using cellphone networks and land lines months ago and instead relies almost entirely on Skype. “Brigade members communicate through the hand-held devices,” he said.

This week rebels posted an announcement via Skype that called for the arrest of the head of intelligence in Idlib, who is accused of killing five rebels. “A big financial prize will be offered to anyone who brings the head of this guy,” the message read. “One of our brothers abroad has donated the cash.”

If the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were Twitter Revolutions, then Syria is becoming the Skype Rebellion. To get around a near-nationwide Internet shutdown, rebels have armed themselves with mobile satellite phones and dial-up modems.

In many cases, relatives and supporters living outside Syria bought the equipment and had it smuggled in, mostly through Lebanon and Turkey.

That equipment has allowed the rebels to continue to communicate almost entirely via Skype with little interruption, despite the blackout. “How the government used its weapons against the revolution, that is how activists use Skype,” Mr. Abdul Rahman said.

“We haven’t seen any interruption in the way Skype is being used,” said David Clinch, an editorial director of Storyful, a group that verifies social media posts for news organizations, including The New York Times (Mr. Clinch has served as a consultant for Skype).

Mr. Assad, who once fashioned himself as a reformer and the father of Syria’s Internet, has largely left the country’s access intact during the 20-month struggle with rebels. The government appeared to abandon that strategy on Thursday, when most citizens lost access. Some Syrians could still get online using service from Turkey. On Friday, Syrian officials blamed technical problems for the cutoff.

The shutdown is only the latest tactic in the escalating technology war waged in Arab Spring countries.

But several technology experts warned that the use of the Internet by rebels in Syria, even those relying on Skype, could leave them vulnerable to government surveillance.

Liam Stack contributed reporting from New York; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.

App Smart: Useful Apps and Games for the iPhone 5 - Review

The arrival of the newest iPhone has prompted a flurry of new apps, many optimized to make the most of its bigger screen. So it’s an ideal moment to highlight the more interesting ones that Apple is promoting.

Games are always a great way to showcase a new device. Perhaps the most impressive of these apps for the iPhone 5 is Lili, a $5 game whose 3-D graphics could almost be for a games console. It’s a role-playing game where you assume control of Lili, a young woman exploring a magical island. There’s the usual mix of puzzles and tasks to be solved, but Lili uses an unusually simple control system where you tap and drag at the screen. This makes the game a joy to interact with, and it means even your younger children can play. Lili has amazing imagery and its own innocent Harry Potter-esque charm.

In a similar vein, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP is another charming $5 game. Despite its deliberately blocky graphics, which hark back to the early era of computer gaming, it’s actually more complex than Lili. As you stroll through the role-playing adventure game, you use a sword and magic to progress. You can also collaborate with friends over Twitter. Its graphics don’t stretch the iPhone’s capabilities, but they do make the most of its new wide screen. Superbrothers is surprisingly engrossing, and funny too. And you’ll want to play it with headphones because there’s a lot of audio feedback, including an album’s worth of original music.

I’m an astronomy fan, and I’ve tried many star guide apps, but the $3 Star Walk may be the best. Like its peer apps, Star Walk uses an augmented reality system to display a picture of the stars in the sky. This moves as you rotate your phone, mapping the sky. But unlike some of its rivals, Star Walk allows you to use the phone’s camera so it shows the real view of the sky on the screen behind the app’s graphics. This helps you work out what stars and constellations you’re seeing. The app also has real-time data on satellites, so if you’re curious whether that fast-moving streak in the sky is actually the International Space Station, the app can tell you. The iPhone 5’s bigger screen is an asset because you see more sky at once.

Despite one of the iPhone 5’s strengths being its camera, a couple of apps are designed to deliberately spoil the image quality of your photos. Halftone app turns them into spotty halftone images like those in a color comic magazine. You can annotate your images with classic comic speech bubbles, captions and so on. It’s fun and pretty easy to use. While some effects are included in the $1 price, there’s an in-app purchase for the more extreme effects. Halftone might be perfect for generating a quirky birthday card image; I plan on using it like this.

E Color Splash is also a neat $1 app that’ll let you turn parts of a photo to black and white while leaving selected bits in color, generating a Spielberg-like effect in a static photo. It’s clever, and though it has slightly mystifying controls, they are well explained in the built-in help video. It’s another app that is great for making card images, probably best for the holiday season if you highlight spots of green and red.

Prismatic, a free news aggregator tool, has been optimized to use the iPhone 5’s full screen. It uses your online profile at sites like Twitter and Facebook to calculate your interests and sets up a rolling feed that contains news stories that you’d probably like to read, versus the unfiltered Web. Prismatic is more basic than the popular free Flipboard app, which has also been made easy to use on iPhone 5, but its graphical simplicity and gestural interface may appeal to you. And it’s always good to try alternatives.

SpeedTest.net is not optimized for the phone’s new screen size, but this free app is useful if you’re curious about how fast your 4G-capable iPhone 5 really is for mobile data. If you’re getting true 4G speeds, its needle will shoot past the maximum 20 megabits per second on its on-screen dial. Very satisfying.

Quick Calls

As promised, TomTom, the GPS company, has finally released its app for Android phones. But buyer beware. The North America edition, $60, is not 100 percent compatible with all Android phones, including some high-end ones. ... AT&T has released Voterhub, a nonpartisan voter assistance app. It’s free on Android and Windows phones, and lets you register to vote or find your nearest polling place.