Truly irritating: "Your Wireless network has been compromised"
Believe it or not, here's yet another stupid feature of Leopard! Whenever it decides it's a good moment to stop your workflow, a little window will pop up and tell you that because your wireless network has been compromised, it will be disabled for a minute.
What it doesn't tell is that it won't connect by itself automatically when that ghostly compromising menace disappears, even if the network password is stored in the keychain. So if you were doing something which depended on the wireless connection, it will never finish unless you're there and make sure you manually connect again to the network.
There are lots of speculative solutions such as changing the encryption method in the router from WPA to WPA2 and whatever… but why should I change anything only because Leopard's wifi support is defective and can't distinguish between failure and attack?
So far, these are Leopard's good points:
- better VNC support
- tabbed terminal
- some tools are preinstalled (svn, ruby… although it's nothing one couldn't get done dedicating a few hours)
- nicer XCode
And these are its annoyances/weaknesses/useless features, plus some more that I can't remember right now or have been fixed in system updates (such as file uploading in the flash plug-in, which was broken from day 0):
- "Your wireless network has been compromised" - and it has just happened again while I wrote this! OH YEAH!
- continuous errors with firewire disks such as my ipod mini
- intrusively inquiring about what do I want to do with what I download
- absurd behaviour after returning from stand-by: on my mac mini left click acts as a right click until I do a control+tab and switch to a different application, on my powerbook the trackpad works like at a 0.00001% of the normal speed and accelerates progressively until it reaches normal speed - even after a completely clean reinstall
- horrible wireless performance. How come the signal strength is only 20% when another computer, side by side, has 100%?
- no more decent mp3 preview - if you switch to a different application while previewing it will stop. It sometimes does not work at all, instead. And there's no way of going back to the previous interface.
- amazingly it still hasn't a decent image viewer which can operate fullscreen
- super ugly folder icons
I wonder if this can be considered a defective product… by all standards it looks like that: these errors are recurrent and I'm experiencing them every single day.
I'm tempted of going back to Tiger but I'm just not willing to spend a single minute of my life re-installing software for the n-th time.
Instead, I hereby demand an immediate fix for these bugs!! I wonder if there's an open case in petitiononline for this…
Jonathan
20080130
This problem is not new to mac. Google "wireless network compromised mac" and you'll find dozens of forums stretching back to 2004 of all kinds of people having this problem. I have it on my imac g4 running tiger and I hate it. So far, apple has failed to address the issue.
sole
20080130
So how come it just popped out right after installing Leopard? Weird, isn't it?
freelancer
20080407
Has anyone figured out how to get rid of this? I've had this several months ago and has gotten rid of it by upgrading my router's firmware. Now this annoying message is back.
sole
20080408
Not that I know. It comes and goes, with the updates.
Raf
20080428
It used to happen to mine when reconnecting my MBP. Did not happen for ages happily had imac running leopard and MBP running tiger sharing the router (+printer attached to imac) like you should be able to do. Then out of nowhere again over and over for about 10mins. Since I read and typed this it all fixed again. All I did was power off the router and all seems fine.
ArZka
20080810
I saw the Wireless network compromised message for the first time two weeks ago when we set up our new wireless network at the office. The problem appeared simultaneously on a MB Air running Leopard as well as a Macbook running Tiger.
The WLAN was built using two Buffalo boxes with Tomato firmware (1.19) using "Access Point+WDS" setup on both, with WPA security. The problem went away when we disconnected the second box. I've dealt with similar setups before and never encountered this problem, but I assume the problem was caused by the computer bouncing between two base stations with different MAC addresses using WPA security. Usually you can't use WDS with WPA - might be just because some computers won't allow it. If you're running WDS on your network, try disabling it and seeing if your problem goes away.
I did try changing it from WPA personal to WPA2 personal, this did nothing to make the problem go away. All it did was prevent one of the Windows machines from connecting, it didn't support WPA2. :)
ssa
20080822
Same problem at our office with 4 macs, 2 pcs. Macs get kicked-off several times a day and every once in a while this is accompanied by the compromised message. Swapped modems (Zyxel), but problem persists on various macs: MB air 10.5, mini 10.4, imac 10.4… really really annoying and haven't found a fix yet :(
Armando Di Cianno
20080930
Checkout my latest post here.
The problem is between OSX and the TKIP security protocol, and is likely influenced by programs like VMWare Fusion or Parallels. Regress security from TKIP or TKIP+AES to only AES, which avoids the Michael integrity check, which will disable the network for 60 seconds upon detection of cracking and intrusion.
Don't regress all the way to WEP, however. ;-)
sole
20080930
No Parallels or VMWare here. The message just appears to pop randomly, specially if you're doing something important and that can't be interrupted like for example copying files over the network ;)
sole
20080930
Oh and by the way I know now the best way of getting rid of the message: use Linux!