I'm interested in knowing how many people in general see their computer as being safe and secure. Do you?

Well, I feel pretty secure. And..who would want to access my computer? They'd find Linux ISO images, rpms, and a bunch of source code...

I feel pretty safe. I do online port scan things and use nmap to my IP address from work and ususally find I'm in pretty good shape. I've started using ssh to my home box from work now, so that's a bit of a concern, but with a dynamic IP address, it helps to a certain extent (I think?).

People don't attempt to access your computer to get what you have on it, most of the time they simply attempt to stick in a spam bot, worst cases they just delete your stuff to make room for theirs.

my uni network regulary probe all comps on the network looking for exploits.

they allways seem quite supprised/pleased when i ask them to confirm that it was them who (unsucsessfully) tried to acsess me on date/time

I would consider myself safe. Both in Linux and Windows I never worked under an administrative account, nor do I even work in a power user account in windows, only a purely restrictive account. If I need to install/uninstall something in windows, I use the Run As feature, otherwise I don't consider myself vulnerable when working in Windows at all. Of course I also don't use IE to browse, and shut off services I don't need. So, yea. I consider myself fairly secure.

I am also behind a router, configured not to respond to any outside pings. No port forwarding or anything either.

Notice I did NOT say I was 100% untouchable, though. Otherwise I wouldn't be using windows update, or following security advisories for my distro either.

I feel pretty safe, anyways, I don't think there exists any totally secure system but the one that is unplugged from the network.

...If a person did it, some other can undo...

The black-hats are more interested in taking over your computer than stealing anything from it.

I personally don't think any computer will ever be completely secure as long as its hooked up to the net.

Like most people now, I guess, I'm using a hardware router. It is set to only forward one port which I use for ssh with an encrypted key, and that is not using default ssh port.

I would say that users with a hardware router and no port forwarding are much safer than they used to be.

I have all ports open and all software acessible, why have I not been hacked? oh i have... but when you run a vm image there is nothing to hack anything that can be hacked can be brought back just as quickly.

One of the things I was wondering about is running an unprotected win2k image in a vm and using it a honey trap. Be an interesting experiment.

I wonder what the response to this post would be like in a windows forum.

Don't think mine is safe.Don't care much about it either because nothing is a 100% safe.

BTW - I read an article a while ago about VM's.You better watch out if you think you can do anything with an VM w/o security repercussions on the host

I never use VM for more than an hour at a time anyway. I also have disabled net connections for my VMs.