Over at Alpha, Rafe Needleman wrote yesterday:

I’m at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. Unfortunately, the Loki location-finding software on my laptop, which I raved about in a previous blog post, thinks I’m in Toronto. Probably the conference team picked up its Wi-Fi access points from an office or event in Toronto and shipped them down here. At any rate, it’s ironic, given the topic of the conference, but more importantly than that, for a few moments, Google thought I was in Canada and sent me to the Canadian version of the site (www.google.ca) when I tried to search. It was no big deal, but it shows you how location data applies to things you don’t always think of as location related. And the potential downsides to poor location data can be serious. Imagine if I had some emergency-response product that thought I was in Toronto instead of San Jose–or if I was on a VoIP phone that was registered to a different location, and then I dialed 911.

Rafe made an excellent point, so we asked our longtime conferences networking provider, GESI, to investigate. Their response? “All six AP’s were reset to factory defaults before I configured them. However, we’ve looked into this some more and found that the Fairmont Hotel IP block is registered in Toronto Canada. All our traffic uses the Fairmont IP.” There it is then.