Because there's a computer in your mouse and you need software on your host computer to talk to and peogram the mouse's computer.
That of course would make it optional like with most programmable keyboards but then there's the need to manage pairing via their wireless dongles and then it quickly becomes necessary.
Outside of it all being intentionally proprietary I don't see why they couldn't take an approach similar to VIA in managing their devices. There's also prior work for flashing microcontrollers from the web browser, I'm thinking of ESP32s specifically.
I suspect it's more than active traffic management, some of it is bound to be probing streets for which they don't have sufficient data.
I've noticed weird little detours in areas where I'm familiar with but engaged navigation merely for an ETA. To me those little detours that don't save time or avoid construction suggest I'm being used to probe those side streets. It's like being a human ICMP packet.
This was a “feature” in Waze in which you would be rewarded (with “candy”) for accepting non-standard routes. It helped them find alternative paths to recommend.
Google has since purchased Waze and now recently merged the teams.
To clarify my previous post, asymmetric routing is strictly an L3 behavior, and ECMP routing can also be an L3 behavior where a router chooses one of many equal-cost next hops based purely on data in the IP headers. The exact behavior of course depends on the ECMP load-balancing algorithm in use, whether it's per packet, per destination, or using a hash. And furthermore whether it's strictly IP or if it looks deeper into the packet and uses L3+L4 headers in its decision making.
Both asymmetric routing and ECMP routing are visible from L3. In the latter case, the routing decision can utilize some L4 data, so some L4 frobbing to get useful data points in practice is necessary for useful real-world diagnosis.
I agree with others that the OSI model is a good metaphor and a framework for reasoning about networking, but it is far from perfect, and the reality for those designing and operating network protocols and devices is messy.
MPLS is admittedly invisible and there isn't a thing you can do about it in the same way that you can't expect traceroute to give you a view of the switch ports it went through on a LAN. Of course it is useful to understand and keep in mind the fact that there may be, sometimes huge, gaps in your traceroutes. A sudden huge jump in RTT from one hop to the next can be confusing when trying to understand and troubleshoot a network issue.
And on the active networking component side of things it doesn't touch on MPLS which also doesn't modify the IP headers. You can enter a network in New York and get MPLS switched across the country via active network devices all the way to California and have it show up as a single hop on traceroute.
The explanation is great for a toy network bu in today's Internet the vast majority of routes are going to be asymmetrical and that requires running traceroutes from both ends and interpreting the results to find the faulty hop.
The author also doesn't cover equal cost multipath (ECMP) which is everywhere. With ECMP you have multiple ports that lead to the same. Next hop and packets are hashed based on some part of the fourtuple, sometimes five tuple including the input Port. In order to track down the faulty link, you need to pro each and every one of the ports which requires that you use a higher level protocol like UDP. Using icmp in this case will not show you an issue some percent of time, providing false negatives which makes it less useful.
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Or ZFS or DRBD or whatever homegrown or equivalent non-proprietart alternative is available these days and you prefer.