[quido]

Traceroute sends a series of packets (of death) with incrementally increasing time-to-live (TTL) values. Each hop a packet makes, this value is decreased by one. When this value reaches zero, the router sends an ICMP error message back to the origin. Each time this value is increased (by one), the traceroute will go one hop further; this is how they get the latency to each hop (by taking the difference vs the previous hop). As the TTL value for a normal packet (of life) is not a low number, certain hops will straight up ignore packets with too low of TTL values because they don't feel it's in their interest to facilitate a fully-functional traceroute.