UPDATE
It turns out that although cgminer 4.11 was working fine for 1.5 years, it suddenly stopped being able to talk to the Kano server, without warning or explanation.
Per Kano's suggestion I upgraded to 4.12 and now it works again, although initially in verbose mode it was spewing "above target" errors. After disabling verbose mode, it mines just fine.
Since you aren't mining at 1 diff on any pool, those messages will always show.
They're the internal check of the diff of each nonce returned.
cgminer
must check the difficulty of each nonce returned by the hardware and decide if the pool wants it.
e.g. when mining at 442 Diff, on average 441 of each 442 nonces returned will be "above target"
It's not an error.