MasterCard has won a domain dispute filed with the WIPO involving the domain mastercard-brasil.com.The name has been taken from Pattishall McAuliffe, the registrant, and transferred to the firm.

In its complaint, MasterCard claimed the name violated its trademark and that the registrant was using it to collect the personal information of customers who had actually intended to visit the real MasterCard site.

It’s clear that the domain violates MasterCard’s trademark, but I doubt that McAuliffe was collecting personal information because according to the case documents, the name was inactive. How can you collect information from a domain without a website?

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Mastercard wins dispute involving mastercard-brasil.com

Few data centers are more important than the one owned by MasterCard in O’Fallon, Missouri. Millions of people swipe their credit cards every day, purchasing anything and everything from coffee to cars. However, few take into consideration the raw computing power that makes all this possible.

This YouTube video shows an inside look at MasterCard’s data center. The facility processes some $1 trillion dollars transferred in 40 billion transactions. How much information is this? The center holds 652 terabytes of data– 175 times the size of all the information in the Library of Congress.

If that weren’t enough, the building contains 743 miles of conduit, 412 miles of wire, 100 miles of copper cable, and 160 miles of optic fiber. Built like a rock, the data center can withstand winds of up to 125 mph as well as a slew of natural disasters. Finally, it generates enough electricity to power a city of 30,000 people!

Source | MasterCard.com (PDF)

Continue reading: Tour the MasterCard data center