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[Sir Finkus]

Is it possible for them to hijack my webcam? It's integrated into my laptop or somesuch...

Yes.

But I believe it will only work when your laptop is on.

Naturally. The camera does need power, and network connectivity is a prerequisite for remote hacking.

Of course, it is not very important unless you place something in front of the camera that could be used against you. I can not find the article right now, but one hacker blackmailed hundreds of teenage girls who happened to leave their computers running while they were undressing — so refrain from being nude in front of it, and you should be safe.

If that was the case, I would be nude in front of it as much as possible.  Naked, unwiped yoga ftw.

[Stargrasper]

If you let it, anything in the computer and anything connected to it can be hijacked.  Do you want someone reading your e-mail, accessing your banking information, playing with your webcam, using you as part of a bot army, watching the movie in your dvd player, etc?

Since we are talking about Linux here...standard behavior is to whip and re-install the whole system once or twice a year anyway.  Unless Ubuntu got really bloated in the least two or three versions, the install from scratch takes approximately twenty minutes, I can't remember what it is, but apt-get and aptitude include a command to export a list of all installed packages that you can plug back in after re-installing to let it automate re-installing your programs.  That step will take awhile, though.

Assuming you haven't already done so, that'll whip it out for sure.  You need to think more about security, though.  The Windows world tries to do everything for you, but you're basically on your own in the Linux world.  It's all standard security concerns, but you might not be used to thinking about the standard.

I'll look into the program.  I like computer security and there's really not a lot specifically targeted at Linux, so this should be interesting.  Probably should do it from a VM, though.

[ChairmanPoo]

Since we are talking about Linux here...standard behavior is to whip and re-install the whole system once or twice a year anyway.

Not really. That's standard old ubuntu behavior, and that only if you want the very latest version. I think it moved onto a rolling distro system in 11.04, though.