I find it amusing that any parent would think they can stop their 16 year old from finding pornography on the Internet. I also wonder what these parents think will happen when their 16 year old son does find pornography on the Internet.

One workaround you could have suggested is to enable router filtering, e.g. MAC address filtering, web filtering, time of day limits. Not every router comes with the more robust filtering features but they all have MAC address filtering. This wouldn't solve the problem of using Safari outside of the home, but it would prevent the boy from surfing from his bedroom. (And yes, I know MAC filtering is fairly easily circumvented, but it's at least another hurdle).

Alternately, the parent could just not give the child the wireless password.

I wanted to point out something that's not immediately obvious with the iPhone/Touch parental controls. They're locked with a 4 digit number. So you might think, "4 digits? Hah! My teen will figure that out in less than an hour!" That's what I thought and that's the reason we initially denied purchase of a Touch.

But then I experimented on my Touch. After 6 "guesses" I was locked out from entering the code for 1 minute. After the 7th guess I was locked out for 5 minutes. After the 8th guess I was locked out for 15 mintues. After the 9th guess I was locked out for 60 minutes. I can only assume it goes up from there, because I wanted to turn my Safari access back on after that!

So I initially thought 4 digits was dumb, but now I think it was a really smart implementation. I couldn't find any information on the internet about this, so I thought someone here might find it useful. Or maybe Chris can drop that in his article also.

Wow it seems futile to rely solely on Parental Controls anymore. Seems like you need to get a free account at OpenDNS.com (http://www.opendns.com/) and there you can limit whole categories (with a free account settings) with putting no obvious software restrictions on the device. IMHO this is the best way to limit teenagers because they have a HARD time figuring out DNS restrictions.

Don't be obtuse, guyncall2. These are simply tools the parent can use to do their job. They don't take the place of parenting, and they don't suddenly make bad parents good. But they are extremely useful for parents who want to put them to use as another tool in the arsenal all parents have. And if companies like Apple are going to provide the tools, they should at least work as advertised, and at the moment Apple's simply don't. They're broken and need to be fixed. 90% of the complaints I've seen are not that the tools don't do enough, it's just that they're very buggy.