iPhone 1.1.1 Wi-Fi Problem

the iPhone 1.0.1 Wi-Fi Problem has not been fixed in 1.1.1, so there still is problem the iPhone is no longer be able to join Wi-Fi networks using a hex WEP key. this means that even with 1.1.1, the only way to address this problem is to change the WEP key of your Wi-Fi network, so that apple's brain-damaged algorithm does not do anything to prevent you from accessing the network. even though there is an explanation of what has been broken in the 1.0.1 software update, the exact nature of the bug is not clear, so the proposed $ hack sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn't.

it would be really helpful if apple at least disclosed how exactly they tried to be smart about guessing whether a key was a password or a hex key, so that iPhone users could avoid the areas where apple's smartness was not quite good enough to make things actually working. until then, the safest way is probably to stay away from number-only hex keys for WEP networks. this issue seems to be too minor to attract attention from apple, even though all they would have to do is roll back the software to the 1.0.0 version, where things were working just fine.

maybe the real problem is apple paying internal rewards for eliminating options: each checkbox removed from the UI probably earns some usability engineer (well, these days it is probably a user experience designer) doing this a big award. rolling this back probably is a big no-no, in the same way as Google for a long time was closely watching the byte-count of their home page, apple may be closely watching the number of available user options, with the ultimate goal of getting them down to zero...