This prototype handbag detects camera flashes and emits a powerful, obscuring strobe that is meant to confound paparazzi. Of course, if there were four paps shooting at once (as there usually seem to be!), it would just ruin one of the four shots.
Last year on July 4, we were walking down the beach in Santa Monica and we saw a pap stop his car in traffic, jump out, run up to the passenger window of a car and start shooting. It turned out Courtney Love and a friend were in the car, enjoying a drive.
We chased the pap back to his car and paced him in the snail-traffic with our cameras, snapping pictures of him as he crawled to the next traffic light.
Update: Inventor Adam Harvey sez, “The device can actually handle any number of incoming photos with no recycle time in between shots.”