Reports have surfaced on the Apple Discussion Boards that WiFi is broken on the new iPod Touch as they apparently don’t connect to some WPA or WPA2 encrypted wireless networks. D-Link routers seem to be hard hit by this, but other types of routers seem to have this problem as well. Certain Linksys and Belkin routers have been reported to have this issue too. The current workaround is to set your wireless network to use WEP encryption which is horribly insecure. WEP encryption can be cracked by the average 8 year old in about 10 minutes using tools found via Google.
Who’s fault is this? That isn’t clear at this point, but assuming the fault lies with Apple, that’s bad. The WPA and WPA2 encryption standards are not new. So the fact that the iPod Touch doesn’t work on networks that use this standard is pretty bad.
One thing to consider: Leopard (OS X 10.5) has had issues with D-Link hardware for almost a year. I’ve personally had problems with my Macbook Pro connecting to D-Link hardware using WPA/WPA2 in the past. So considering that the iPod Touch uses OS X, perhaps this is a old Apple bug resurfacing?
I’ll keep you posted as this one evolves.