The last time I crossed the Swiss border was from the south: Mr Honeyball and I were going from Cannes to Mulhouse and the Schlumpf Museum (link is noisy – speakers off!), and I figured out that the best way to do this is not to schlep all the way round the French Alps, but instead go through the Gotthard pass and overnight in Lucerne.

As always, the Swiss border guards are like someone from Friends Reunited: cautious, a bit shy, and then the minute you are nice to them you are their best friend ever. Jon was expecting to be taken away and have his fillings sent for assay, but I deliberately picked a small crossing on the SP3 from Varese & Malnate, knowing the traffic would be light and the guys would be relaxed – and we wanted to drive over the bizarre ground-loops we found on Google Maps.

This friendly but thorough encounter – and a previous visit, going in through Basel, where the guards spent longer marvelling at the Japanese tax-disc on my personal import Subaru that they did looking at my passport – put me in mind of people’s approach to firewalls.

Working with a home network is not about appointing yourself a nice Swiss border guard (say “Gruezi” to the ones in the eastern half of the country if you want to be well treated, and make sure you roll the R without typical British embarrassment). it’s far more like having a garden wall with five different colour coded Tradesman’s entrances, all with doorknobs wired up to the 3-phase at your nearest substation – and yet so many devices now want unlimited access both to, and from, the web.

This last month I have had more questions about PS3 and XBox cohabitation on home networks, than all the other enquiries put together. It seems like those machines want to stand on the net unprotected and unencumbered: the fact that attack traffic seems to backtrack into all the addresses where games consoles announce themselves, on the principle that people playing games are probably not terribly au fait with protecting their other compute resources, seems to support my suggestion:

Buy yourself a proper, separate, hardware firewall. Not some freebie that hacker dudes can treat like a Swiss border guard.