Users Report Faulty WPA In 2nd-Gen IPod Touch 188
jesuscash writes "It seems early adopters of the new iPod Touch are out of luck when they bring it home and attempt to connect it to their WPA/WPA2 secured network. Reading this Apple forum thread shows that many tests with different configurations show a no-go on WPA. Some of the last entries give the best clue, revealing a 'received deauthentication' error in their router logs. Apple has yet to respond."
The Sony Syndrome (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems it's very hard to push stuff out quickly without getting into quality issues. Problem for Apple is that they depend even more than Microsoft on locking in their users. One bad experience, and people will take the pain to find an alternative, and then escape.
I love my Mac gadgets but the deal seems to be going wrong, and my next MP3 player and phone is going to have to be a lot more open.
Re:The Sony Syndrome (Score:2, Interesting)
No problems here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mine works at two different locations that I set up.
Re:QC? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Steve's policy of not significantly increasing engineering staff is finally biting Apple in the ass. I know that when I use my Mac nowadays its hard to remember that I'm NOT using a Microsoft product, Apple's stuff is just as buggy.
WPA on the iphone/ipod was a joke anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
A real geek has a long random key for WPA, and passes it around on a pen drive.
Except the time I brought a Touch home from work for a while.
Copy and paste? What do you mean, no copy and paste? One of the key "insanely great" f'ing innovations of the 1984 Macintosh, and it can't be done?
Shook my head at that one.
Re:Problem seems to be with D-Link routers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the hell did this get promoted to the front page?
We have personally confirmed the failing on three DLink models, and one Linksys model so far. Thread shows other Linksys models and Belkin models as well it appears.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8066893#8066893 [apple.com]
Thats why it made the front page.
new BRCM chip (Score:3, Interesting)
That new iPod touch has a hw change on its Wifi. The disassembly showed it to be a BT+Wifi single chip design. Presumably its just a host driver/fw issue that will get resolved soon.
H.
An old problem, resurfaced (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, this problem has existed for over a year, albeit with other Apple products. Many MacBook Pros running Leopard cannot connect through D-Link routers using WPA.
I know: I have one of these machines. In my house we have two iPhones (1st gen) and one MacBook Pro (Tiger) which connect just fine through my D-Link. But the MacBook Pro running Leopard cannot. (It can, however, connect just fine to an Airport device using WPA.)
I don't think it's a D-Link bug. Or else why would everything else under the sun work just fine, including all the guest machines who come over and log in? And it's not a general wireless issue, because the buggy Leopard machine connects through lots of other wireless routers.
I googled this a while back and there are a few other folks who have experienced this. No relief via any Leopard updates, either.
Re:Single apple ipod touch bug slashdot worthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't pretend they're not issues, they just don't disclose them or "acknowledge" them, especially on their support forums which are community discussions. In the case of security vulnerabilities, I wish they would disclose some problems, but the simple fact is that they don't, and that's how it's always been.
Furthermore, for the record, I have no problems at all with 2.1, and the improvements were very welcome. Also, you certainly can roll back to previous versions. In iTunes you can select the firmware to "restore" to, so your last statement is just misinformation.
Re:Single apple ipod touch bug slashdot worthy? (Score:2, Interesting)
You may be focusing specifically on OS updates, but Apple's security updates usually have a itemized description of each bug, including shout-outs to the people who reported them. You can usually get to it by following links from the description in Software Update, and you could probably find it via the website if you cared to.
In general, I think we're seeing a demographic disconnect with a lot of the comments here. To use the ever-popular car analogy, the overwhelming majority of car users just want their car to be a reliable form of transportation that "just works". Same with computers. We here are from a demographic that ranges from button-pushers to tinkerers to professional mechanics who could build a car from scratch, and our concerns are different than 95% of Windows/Apple users. Technical detail is our lifeblood, that's why we come here, but we don't expect it in the mass media any more than we expect our politicians to live up to the moral values they try to impose on the rest of us.
If WPA is broken on the new Touch (and it sounds like it is), then that's one stupid effing bug. I was thinking of getting one so I could play with programming a touch/gesture interface on what appears to be a very nice portable media display, but that's a show-stopper.
Re:Single apple ipod touch bug slashdot worthy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget the Zune, what about XP? At least as of SP2, the ability to even connect to a WPA2 network (and maybe WPA as well) is provided by a non-critical hotfix that requires WGA authentication to download. Apple may not publicly acknowledge bugs, but at least they're not forcing you ensure you've got a Genuine® iPodâ before being allowed to get to a patch that adds functionality that was left out entirely to begin with.
This may have been addressed in SP3; I have no idea - there are no XP SP3 systems on my wireless network (3 Macs, 1 Vista, and 1 XP SP2 system from the office that's had the aforementioned patch applied).
Bugs happen. It sucks. But all programmers know this. Apple's way of dealing with them certainly rubs the fur of Slashdot's FOSS crowd the wrong way, but nobody has forced any of us to buy their products. The 2.0.0 firmware was quite buggy, and the 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 updates addressed some of those bugs. Given some of the fairly major changes in 2.1 (mostly bugfixes almost as a service pack of sorts, but the iPod app got quite a few new features and interface tweaks if nothing else), you have to expect that 2.1.1 will address what's been introduced. There were a lot of network-related changes made in 2.1 to address dropped call issues in the iPhones, and as the software is mostly identical between the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's certainly likely that one of those changes introduced these bugs.
Might be partially a DLink problem (Score:2, Interesting)
From a quick RTFA the initial user has a DLink router.
FWIW, I bought a DLink wireless router a year or so back for my home network, don't recall the model, that would not do WPA2/TKIP with Windows (yeah, I know) Vista or XP, or my PSP. I'm an experienced network engineer, not a novice. It took a couple days fooling with it, several support emails, and then several hours on the phone with DLink before they finally said WPA was broke and to use WEP. IIRC Windoz was logging authentication errors.
The DLink got returned and replaced with a Netgear WGR614 that worked the first time, and still works today.