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Diablo III auction house down for 'at least another 24 hours'
Diablo III's auction house continues to be the stuff of legends. You may remember that a couple of days ago, the Diablo III auction house went down for a time due to a gold duplication bug that was being rampantly exploited by players. Thankfully, a patch was deployed in a nice, timely manner, and everything ended up all right. Or did it? Rather than performing a server rollback, which would set all Diablo III players back, Blizzard has decided to perform a complete audit of the transactions made on the auction house in order to find players guilty of utilizing the gold duplication exploit. Unfortunately, Blizz was a bit conservative in its estimate of how long the auction house would be down. While there's currently no new ETA for the auction house's return, a post by Blizzard CM Lylirra states that the studio anticipates the AH being down for "at least another 24 hours" while the audits are in progress.
Samsung finishes initial Chinese factory audits, plans long-term solutions to labor woes
Samsung faced some serious allegations surrounding the plants of its Chinese contractor HEG Electronics earlier this month, including potentially dire accusations that HEG was employing child labor. The Korean firm promised audits to set the record straight, and we're seeing the first fruits of those inspections today. The results were decidedly mixed. While there weren't any underage workers when Samsung visited, it did find HEG staff working excessive overtime, some unsafe practices and a system that punished late workers with fines. Samsung's response will go beyond just asking HEG to shape up, though: it plans to finish auditing all 105 of its exclusive Chinese contractors by the end of September, determine whether inspections of non-exclusive contractors are needed and set up a long-term audit schedule past 2013 that includes tougher requirements. While there's no certainty that the reforms will lead to the intended results, we're glad to hear that Samsung wants to turn things around at such a rapid pace.
Apple: "iPod City" investigation still underway
Despite recent comments by a Foxconn spokesperson that Apple had already investigated and found no problems with the Chinese factory that has come to be known as "iPod City," BusinessWeek is reporting that the probe is still in fact underway, with an Apple representative reiterating that the company takes "allegations of noncompliance very seriously." According to spokesperson Steve Dowling, Apple is in the midst of a "thorough audit" of the Hon Hai-owned plant, which had recently admitted to breaking labor laws concerning overtime, but which continues to deny other allegations contained in the original Daily Mail exposé. Specifically, Dowling says that the auditors are looking into "employee working and living conditions," conducting interviews with workers and their managers (separately, we hope), and generally making sure that the factory lives up to a supplier code of conduct that supposedly "sets the bar higher than accepted industry standards." This is all very good news indeed, but now Apple faces yet another hurdle in the form of a jaded public highly skeptical of corporate-speak, meaning that whether the investigation turns up violations or not, the company may still have a hard time convincing folks to accept the auditors' final verdict.[Via AppleInsider, image courtesy of Mail on Sunday]
