It's even more useful than that! Some coffee shops restrict traffic over port 80, but don't touch 22. So set up a SOCKS proxy and you have free internet. Tether

It's even more useful than that! Some coffee shops restrict traffic over port 80, but don't touch 22. So set up a SOCKS proxy and you have free internet. Tethering to T-Mobile and getting sick of them downsampling images for you? Start up a SOCKS proxy -- they can't downsample what they don't see. Or just in general, if you're on any WiFi network that you don't trust, set up a SOCKS proxy and tunnel everything through it.