I'm a newb, obviously, and I'm taking my first steps into the world of hacking, but I'm stuck. I'm trying to break into my own computer from a friend's but I believe my ISP has some sort of firewall up that makes identifying it impossible.

I ping my computer, but the request always times out, even though I know the computer is up and running. I use traceroute, but after 10 hops, I get back asterisks instead of valid hostnames.

I can connect to the computer using Yahoo and AIM to do picture / file sharing, etc... and when I do a netstat while connected, I can get my comps ip address, but other than that I can't port scan, use nbtstat... nothing.

What can I do to bypass this? Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks!

If you're on a residential connection, the traffic is probably filtered (at either or both ends).

What Bill means is that traffic of this type is filtered by the ISP at one or both ends if you have a residential account.  ISP's do this for the type of reason you point out (not running a firewall).  If they didn't do this, your computer would be owned by someone else within hours of being connected to the Internet.  Its just the world we live in.  If this is legal (i.e. really your computer) and you want to break in, you probably need to do it from the inside (ignoring all the ways you could do it with malicious web attacks).  Configure an executable payload to call to your friend's IP on a port you know you can connect to.  There are plenty of tutorials on doing this with metasploit.

Good luck and don't do anything illegal.

nmap -PN 1.2.3.4

Get a second pc and hack from your own network.

You'll learn more and you won't take the chance of getting in any trouble.

One more question, what type of computer background do you have?