I don't really feel like there's that many people misusing netcat out there. It's mostly useful to me as a server for hand testing client software against a known (and human-talkable) server protocol.

Is there some rash of people opening up public listening ports using netcat to... run a service of some sort? Most of the time when I need an arbitrary connection between unix machines ssh in command (not even port forward) mode is more than enough.