BEIRUT -- Shortly after midnight one night last week, two 20-something Syrians huddled over a computer, trying to sort out exactly what had happened that day at Damascus University.

Online reports suggested that three students had been shot at the school. Syrian State TV, meanwhile, put the number at five and implied that the shooter was a disaffected member of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

This seemed suspiciously convenient, in the opinion of the two Syrians, who had friends attending the university and who asked not to be identified by name. Currently living in Beirut, both are refugees of a sort: One had come to the city to escape compulsory military service, the other had fled his hometown in Syria after receiving threatening phone calls.

As they sat in a small basement studio in East Beirut, scouring the few accounts of the shooting in secure online chat rooms and speaking with friends on Skype, useful information was proving difficult to find.

"We don't know anything," the young man who had fled threats in Damascus said in frustration. "Maybe tomorrow we will know something about what happened today."

Every day in Beirut, there is a struggle to find reliable information about Lebanon's troubled neighbor next door, where a deadly anti-government uprising is now in its tenth month.