You may also wish to investiate a non-Perl option that might be a tool you will find useful, connect.c

Edit: added more information

In addition, you can use PuTTY in Windows or the standard OpenSSH client to do allow for the tunneling.

If you use the -D8080 option, then your SSH server will act as a SOCKs proxy, and you can set up Firefox to use a SOCKs proxy on http://127.0.0.1 port 8080

The equivalent in PuTTY is to set up using the Tunnels tab. See the PuTTY docs describing port forwarding and using port forwarding in PuTTY