Finally, your Dave Clark Five fan club can find electronic solace somewhere unsullied by legions of Herman’s Hermits and Monkees fans. GigaTribe “lets you share entire folders with friends in a private peer to peer (P2P) environment.” It's also free.
My favorite part about whenever a new service like this launches is the semantic race it has to run in order to pretend people will only use it legally. The GigaTribe website, for one, features a random quote at the bottom that outlines a sham reason someone might use GigaTribe for something other than illegal file-sharing. “Oliver H,” for example, “a real estate agent, uses GigaTribe to exchange pictures of houses and apartments with his clients and co-workers.” How ethical! “Thanks to GigaTribe, Nanny can grab all of the movies and pictures of her grandchildren who live far from her.” Hey Nanny, I didn’t know Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker were your grandchildren! Cool!
There’s also something about some sound engineer sending recordings to his bandmates or whatever, but let’s get down to business: This is a streamlined, secure new way for you and your friends to exchange countless illegal copies of stuff you’d otherwise have to pay for. You can even make a fun, immature show out of excluding people you don’t like. For example: Maybe there’ll be a TinyMixTapes GigaTribe. You’ll never know. You’re not invited. Long live the new file-sharing flesh.
