Socat is also useful to hide services that otherwise force themselves on a network interface. My torrent daemon has no business permanently exposing the Web co

Socat is also useful to hide services that otherwise force themselves on a network interface. My torrent daemon has no business permanently exposing the Web controls on any network interface - not even localhost, because localhost is potentially accessible by untrusted stuff running in the browser. I solve this by placing it inside a dedicated, firewalled container, and using socat to forward from a local socket (browser can't access) to the network one. When I need to connect to it via the browser, I do the opposite forwarding (SSH can also forward to local sockets).