NickelBlock: It’s a Plugin That Blocks Anything Nickelback Related…
Nickelback is out with a new album, but you’d never know if you have ‘NickelBlock’ installed. That’s the name of a recently-released browser plugin for both Firefox and Chrome that actively blocks any information related to the band. Developed by Aux.tv, the band-scrub imagines a world without the musical contributions of these Canadian rockers. “That’s it. You’ll never read about Nickelback again,” the company promises.
We tried the Chrome extension, and found it a little half-baked. Several mentions of Nickelback slipped through the cracks, raising the question of whether a Nickelblock’d internet is a practical impossibility. Other pages were more impressively scrubbed, including this YouTube search for ‘Nickelback’. Even the band’s name was scrubbed from the browser tab and search box.
Aux.tv was inspired by earlier pioneers in this scrubbing arena, most notably ‘Shaved Bieber,’ also a browser plug-in. ‘Shaved Bieber,’ developed by Free Art & Technology, batted a bee’s nest of controversy by muting every Bieber mention, lyric, and image from the browsing experience. In fact, the developers soon found themselves engulfed in a jihad-like, multi-theatre campaign against teenage girls throughout the world. Nickelblock is unlikely to face such a vociferous backlash.
Source: Digital Music News
