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More Britons than ever have access to the internet, but inequalities remain between those with high and low incomes, official figures show.

Of those, 96% of the highest 10% of earners were online, compared to little more than one-quarter of the lowest 10%.

An increasing proportion of people - almost 40% - said they simply do not need the internet at home, while some 22% complained that a lack of skills hampered their efforts.

Online education is best known for serving older, nontraditional students who can not travel to colleges because of jobs and family. But the same technologies of “distance learning” are now finding their way onto brick-and-mortar campuses, especially public institutions hit hard by declining state funds. At the University of Florida, for example, resident students are earning 12 percent of their credit hours online this semester, a figure expected to grow to 25 percent in five years. This may delight undergraduates who do not have to change out of pajamas to “attend” class. But it also raises questions that go to the core of a college’s mission: Is it possible to learn as much when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student’s education and growth — academic and personal — depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?

Facebook may have found a way to break the Egyptian government’s blockade of its website. The government there has been blocking several social media sites that demonstrators are using to organize and document protests. Today marks the third day of protests in Egypt calling for the ouster of long-time President Hosni Mubarak. Facebook is using lessons it learned in Tunisia, where the government allegedly hacked its Web site and tried to steal the passwords and personal information of protesters in that country. Jillian York of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society monitors the Arab world online and discusses efforts to get around governments’ blockades of social media sites

It will be the first time any government has sought to provide a single form of digital identification for internet users, coded to provide a form of filtered identity information, giving out only as much information as needed depending on the type of online transaction.