This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Bidazzled. All opinions are 100% mine.

I am quite ashamed to admit that although I have been a netizen for many years now, I have never tried penny auctions. I regularly participate in regular online auctions, though, and have heard of penny auctions and thought that I should get my Christmas gifts from a penny auction site this year but never got around to it.

I was introduced to Bidazzled earlier this morning and I have to say that this is a penny auction site with a difference as it supports The Ruch Foundation, a lung cancer charity, channeling over 70% of profits to the foundation.

It is amazing to learn that winners of auctions on Bidazzled typically save up to 80% off retail price on merchandise, even popular consumer electronic products. I am sure you know how expensive they could be! Registering with Bidazzled will gain you five free bids. I am very surprised that there were two users who managed to win their items with just these five free bids without further investment.

Like typical penny auction websites, if you failed to win an auction, you may receive an offer to purchase the item at a low price. If you win, Bidazzled offers to buy back the item from you in cash or in the form of bids or both!

The good news is that Bidazzled has an exclusive offer for you. Receive an additional of 15 free bids when you register for an account. You will have to use the following codes (valid until 15th January, 2010) requested on the registration page:

Blog: BBP1202A
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Do know that Bidazzled is only open to residents of the United States of America so take advantage of it!

Logging into my MySpace account yesterday, I was surprised to get an alert that my account has been suspended due to a phishing attack and that now I am unable to post a comment, add a friend or basically do anything else with my account unless I change my password.

To know that my account has been phished was pretty alarming and I am concerned that I was not informed of it one way or another and only got to know about it when I logged into my account.

The suspension on my account has been lifted but I am still concerned. I wonder if it was really phished in the first place or if it was just suspended as a precautionary measure since I did not log into my account for a long time already.

In any case, it seems pretty easy to have our accounts with social networks phished, or hacked, and so it is best to use a password that is different from the one that we use for our email or financial accounts like online banking and PayPal and even eBay.

If you are a user of RockYou, either at its website or installed a RockYou application on a social network profile, then you should change to your password immediately. A hack to its website earlier this month has compromised more than 32.6 million login IDs and passwords of user accounts which were, surprisingly, stored in plain text when they should be encrypted.

Right now, no one can really tell the impact such a breach of security will have on users since most of us use the same password on a multitude of websites, especially on websites that use our email address as login ID.

I shudder to think of the work that entails a RockYou user who would have to change his or her password on a list of websites that share the same password. If this happened to me, frankly, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps I should start by listing down a list of websites that may have the same password.

Anyway, this is the security notice from RockYou.com (http://www.rockyou.com/help/securityMessage.php) though I think that these actions, taken after the fact, would only mean something to NEW users who have just created an account after the hack has occurred.

I have been using Google Chrome a lot lately because there is something wrong with my IE. I switched to Firefox earlier already, of course, but sometimes, when I access websites that I have two different accounts, like Facebook and Google, I prefer to use two different browsers because I am so lazy to sign in to one account after another, especially when playing games. Did you notice that Chrome does not support flash very well?

Anyway, I found Chrome to be a little lacking in features so I went to try out some Google Chrome extensions. They are like Firefox extensions that enhance the browser’s functionality.

One thing I have to say is that if you are also experimenting with Google Chrome extensions, you may want to be alert of what you are installing. Some have the same name of a trusted Firefox extension but they may carry nefarious intentions. From what I understand, this is a rather serious problem with Google Chrome extensions. So install with caution.

If you have a Facebook account, you may want to view your privacy settings. Google is going to index all our Facebook status updates but you can disable that by checking your privacy settings on Facebook.

Some people may just have discovered that we can Google a name and get access to certain information of this person’s Facebook profile. We can also disable this totally, or just allow access to limited information or also allow people to contact us via private messaging.

Even though I value privacy, I think that when we have a Facebook account or an account with any social network on the internet, run a website or blog, I think that one would know that as long as we have information on the web, we would not be totally safe from being searchable on the web.

Right after the announcement that a Malaysian company, MOL Global, is acquiring Friendster, ICQ is up for sale to the highest bidder and one of the interested parties is Google.

Who remembers ICQ? I remember that even when ICQ, which was acquired by AOL many years ago, was big, I was not using it as often as some other people. True, I did download and install it, like many other free programmes on my computer, and I also logged in to my ICQ every my computer started up and connected to the internet but I only had a few contacts who used ICQ and you know, most of them either moved on to Yahoo! Messenger and then subsequently to MSN or I no longer keep in touch with them anymore.

Apparently, even ICQ is not used as much in the United States anymore but it is still big in Russia. Eh? LOL Russians didn’t move on? I guess it’s because of language support or something.

The reason that Google is interested to acquire it is because they need a foothold to penetrate into the Russian market and ICQ seems like an appropriate tool for them right now.

Hot on the heels of a redesign, Friendster announced that they are to be acquired by a Malaysian company, MOL Global. Although the price was not disclosed, industry sources estimates it to be at least US$100 million. MOL Global, whose main shareholder is Berjaya Corp., a very dynamic Malaysian company with business concerns around the world, already has an alliance with Friendster as its micropayments provider.

You know, it’s kind of funny that although Friendster, valued at US$210 million back in July, 2009, was one of the earliest social networking portal, many people who used Friendster have subsequently moved on to other “cooler” social network sites like MySpace, and subsequently Facebook but Frienster users here in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines are still stuck to the Friendster era. Friendster was launched sometime in 2002 or 2003 and that in internet speak was eons ago!

Personally, I have already moved on to Facebook and hardly log into my other social network accounts with Friendster, MySpace, Hi5 and some other social websites that I don’t even remember the name to and may have lost my password too but with a redesign and the inclusion of social games that I spend a lot of time playing on Facebook, like Mafia Wars and Restaurant City, I may just check Friendster out again.