You sound like someone who would throw their child's painting away instead of putting it on the fridge because it was just a piece of paper with a few brushes of paint slapped onto it.
WHAT LOL. You're on hacker news and you're complaining that people are hacking?! Literally the entire tenet is playing around and experimenting for our own edification and fun. On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup... something to the effect of "just a hobby, won’t be big and professional". I MEAN COME ON MR HACKER_NEWZ. The irony is deafening.
Full circle. Jeff originally wrote the open source program localtunnel[0], which ngrox was originally built on top of (though I doubt it is still based on that but maybe), now an open source solution to replace the commercial thing, that's based on the open source thing :)
The beauty and freedom of open source shines through
Thanks for the history. I maintain this list[0], and wasn't aware of OG localtunnel, likely because there's a somewhat newer and now more popular project with the same name[1]. You appear to be correct on timing. Here's the earliest commits on GitHub for each of the projects:
Last year I've configured a simple ssh + Caddy based ngrok alternative and it works beautifully every since. I've shared instructions on https://github.com/ziolko/tunnel for anyone interested.
I maintain the list mentioned above. Generally the main features on top of SSH you get from something like this is the reverse proxy in addition to the tunnels. So think SSH tunnel plus TLS certs, maybe auth, etc.
I made my own as well (I think we're not far off parity between number of ngrok alternatives and developers), the main interest over ssh is traffic inspection. And not having an ssh port open to the world.
All the open source ngrok alternatives I've seen miss the importance of inspect and replay - looks like you've done that nicely.