NTL censoring the nets?

So in my new apartment I currently have an NTL Internet connection. It's what the previous occupant used, and I haven't had time to replace it so far ... but I definitely will.

One interesting thing is that it routes all traffic via Amsterdam, even traffic to Ireland and the UK. Surely that's not very efficient, but latencies are acceptable so far. What bothers me more is that they seem to dislike Web Archive. I can't use that site. I haven't been able to load it at all here.

Things are just suspicious if:

--- web.archive.org ping statistics ---
84 packets transmitted, 83 received, 1% packet loss, time 83034ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 197.106/200.818/210.630/2.764 ms

the round trip (both with ping and traceroute (which shows >30 hops)) seems to take 0.2 seconds while:

09:56:06.312106 IP 192.168.9.106.41612 > 207.241.233.253.80: S 2524718098:2524718098(0) win 5840
09:56:06.343849 IP 207.241.233.253.80 > 192.168.9.106.41612: S 1027425240:1027425240(0) ack 2524718099 win 5792
09:56:06.343916 IP 192.168.9.106.41612 > 207.241.233.253.80: . ack 1 win 183
09:56:06.385372 IP 207.241.233.253.80 > 192.168.9.106.41612: F 1:1(0) ack 1 win 5792

Meanwhile a TCP connection gets ACKed and then FINed in 0.03 plus 0.07 seconds. How did that website suddenly get so close?? ;-)

So for anyone who thinks of going here and doesn't like it when companies try to judge what you can and what you can't see: DON'T TAKE NTL BROADBAND!!! I'll have my PSTN line in a few days and will get Magnet ADSL instead.

UPDATE: traceproto is cool. It's a traceroute-like program that can also use TCP packets to find a path:

ttl 15: ICMP Time Exceeded from pc-62-30-249-10-ha.blueyonder.co.uk (62.30.249.10)
28.267 ms 30.866 ms 31.304 ms
ttl 16: ICMP Time Exceeded from pc-62-31-0-204-nm.blueyonder.co.uk (62.30.0.204)
30.421 ms 32.453 ms 40.027 ms
ttl 17: TCP Syn Ack from web.archive.org (207.241.233.253)
40.422 ms 35.247 ms 31.637 ms

If I traceroute to any other port on the same machine, the 17th hop is another blueyonder.co.uk machine (and 13 more hops follow it). So it looks like it's actually BlueYonder causing problems here. While BY claims in their FAQ that they don't censor anything, except if the police ask them to do so. Really?....