After our story yesterday on an apparently "useless" update Nintendo sent out to Wii owners yesterday, it has become clear what the purpose of the update really was.
Because the Wii Shop Channel is actually a website, some enterprising Wii owners had used a PC-based DNS "hack" to fool the Wii into visiting Google or other sites in place of the Wii Shop site—effectively allowing Wii owners unrestricted Web access; although with no keyboard or on-screen input, these efforts were more for a sense of achievement rather than new functionality. The update, we've discovered, fixes the Wii Shop Channel to stop this behavior, and also updates the Wii Shop Channel website itself to prevent it from being accessed by the Firefox web browser on the PC.
It is unknown if there were any other updates, but it seems to be localized to just the Wii Shop Channel, and the system information screen still lists the system version as 2.0U—as it did before the update.
Because the Wii Shop Channel is actually a website, some enterprising Wii owners had used a PC-based DNS "hack" to fool the Wii into visiting Google or other sites in place of the Wii Shop site—effectively allowing Wii owners unrestricted Web access; although with no keyboard or on-screen input, these efforts were more for a sense of achievement rather than new functionality. The update, we've discovered, fixes the Wii Shop Channel to stop this behavior, and also updates the Wii Shop Channel website itself to prevent it from being accessed by the Firefox web browser on the PC.
It is unknown if there were any other updates, but it seems to be localized to just the Wii Shop Channel, and the system information screen still lists the system version as 2.0U—as it did before the update.