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Traceroute Isn't Real

Almost nobody understands how traceroute works. Worse, it's not a real tool

Instead, routers contain custom, purpose-built hardware - called the data plane- consisting of dedicated silicon with the sole ability to look at the parts of a packet that matter for routing purposes and ask a couple very simple questions, e.g."Do I have a way to get this to its next hop?" As I implied, this is how supercomputers often work: you have a massive array of extremely fast processors, that can only solve certain, very well defined kinds of problems, and then off to the side you have some horrible little Core i3 Ideapad Yoga whose sole job is to feed program and data into the thing and then pull the string on its back. People casting spells, executing words of power, trying to read tea leaves and declaring that the end times are coming, not because the hard info isn't available, but because it's incredibly difficult to obtain and interpret.

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