I have a fixed line broadband connection at home. This morning when I tried acce

Question

I have a fixed line broadband connection at home. This morning when I tried accessing Google or Facebook through my browser (Google Chrome) I got a webpage asking me to update my flash player. I found this to be a little suspicious since I had accessed Facebook just a little while earlier from the same machine on a different network. My suspicions were confirmed when the similar thing happened when I tried to connect through a different system and my mobile.

When I tried to ping Facebook or Google, the packets are sent to an IP based in Seattle (108.62.62.234). When I tried to trace the route of the packets, I found a shocking thing that the packets were being sent first to my ISP and then were being sent to that IP.

Is someone tampering my connection? What is happening? What needs to be done in future?

Explanation / Answer

I have no idea who you are and thus why I should or should not trust you. It is my habit, though, of not trusting people "over the Internet"; I use the Internet to exchange information and there is no notion of trusting people for that (there is such a notion of cross-validating information, though).

"ISP" means Internet Service Provider. It is perfectly normal that packets that you send to "the Internet" go through your ISP because that is exactly what you pay them for: to provide you some connectivity with the rest of the world. Maybe you previously imagined that IP packets magically teleported across the planet from your computer to some distant server; learn today that it is not true. Packets travel over links: radio, wire, optic fibre... the mediums are varied, but the concept is the same: an IP packet hops from node to node, starting with your computer, final node being the destination server. The link which goes from your computer to the next node is, exactly, the one rented to your by your ISP, and the next node is the one maintained by the ISP.

If you don't want your ISP to do their job, you can switch to another ISP. Or you can elect to dispense with any ISP altogether, but it may have adverse effects on your bandwidth (meaning: when there is no Internet, well, there is no Internet).

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