I JUST WAS PLAYING AROUND WIth neotrace and traced yahoo.com from san diego and near be something like 30 networks to budge through between me and yahoo---- neotrace give adjectives the ip addys couldnt someone use these ip's some how against yahoo.
Answers:
The internet is primarily a store and forward meet people. When a packet get to a node, that node make a local judgment roughly speaking where on earth to forward it.
Assuming neotrace is approximately one and the same as trace route, the footpath you saw be freshly the catwalk that be found via the pings that neotrace uses. A nefarious human being could target these intermediate nodes for an attack (whether physical approaching a bomb, or electronic approaching a denial of service). However, one of the great things roughly the internet, is that if a node can't connect to a individual intermediate node, it in recent times select another. Thus the track to Yahoo could consist of any of a massive number of possible sub-paths.