[ScottEd]

A trace route is where you do a trace from one point or IP on the internet to another. It will give you what servers you "hop" to get to your final location and if it fails, you will be able to see where it fails or what server may be down or causing a problem between you and a particular website or server etc.

If you're on a windows machine, just bring up a dos prompt and type in tracert google.com. It will then print out all of the servers you have to go through to get to google.com from your current connection.

You have to have a start point and a finish point. The start point would be you/your ISP and the finish point would be google.com.

It's a standard internet function, which I doubt mrmustang could have used to trace anything. If he were to try and trace an ip address of a person that posted a message, he would get hops to that person, and nothing more, and that's IF that particular person still had that IP address AT the exact time he did the trace. Being that when most people connect to the internet, their ISP assigns them a different IP address for each connection, that's a small possibility (unless you have paid for a static ip address or have an always on connection which I do not have).

If I were to do a traceroute to you, all I would end up with of much use at the end, would be your IP address and that's pretty much what I started out with. Traceroutes are worthless for what he's talking about, because he can't produce the same ip that posted more than one of these "supposed" posts. If you can produce the same ip and show that ip was used to post messages in multiple places, you can pretty much determine that it was the same person that made each of those posts. BUT, even if you did find what he's suggesting (which you won't), you'd have to tie it to a person, which you can't do without going through a legal proceeding to subpoena logs from the ISP that owns that IP address.

Again... he has nothing to back up what he's saying.

Scott