port forwarding on linux without root or ssh

i would also prefer ssh BECAUSE of the encryption, but 'socat' should work fine for you as well.

"If what you are doing works, and you aren't seeing any performance problems, I wouldn't change anything. If you aren't transferring large amounts of data, it shouldn't have much of an impact. And if you are, ssh can compress the data, so you still might be better off.

The only problem might be with latency. It looks like you are tunneling http traffic, so it should be negligible."