Much of the current crop of gadgetry runs on touchscreens, but it won’t always be that way. We’re already seeing a generation of gadgets that do away with screens entirely, starting with the early success of the Kinect. A more precise gesture-tracking module, the Leap Motion controller, shipped out to nearly 30,000 developers this summer, planting seeds for a post-touch takeover in the next few years. In an interview this summer, Valve’s Gabe Newell put it this way:

You have to look at what’s going to happen post-tablet. If you look at the mouse and keyboard, it was stable for about 25 years. I think touch will be stable for about 10 years. I think post-touch, and we’ll be stable for a really long time — for another 25 years.

But one big question still hasn’t been answered: what is it good for? Post-touch hasn’t found the killer use case that the mouse found with GUIs and the touchscreen found with mobile web browsing and apps — but it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve had a flood of prototypes, demos and art projects, any one of which could flourish into an industry — that is, once every laptop comes with a near-field depth camera. As for which will take off…it’s anyone’s guess. But some guesses are better than others:

LAS VEGAS — Researchers have uncovered a huge amount of malware and registered domains being used by criminals linked to China who are conducting cyber-espionage on a wide range of government, industry, and human rights activists.

The growing menace from these “Advanced Persistent Threats” is detailed in a report unveiled today called “Chasing APT.” In an interview at the Black Hat security conference here, Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell Secureworks Counter Threat Unit, said that over the last 18 months he’s been monitoring attacks designed to steal data from organizations around the world. Two primary groups, in Shanghai and Beijing, appear to be behind the attack operations, he said.

The groups were using more than 200 unique families of custom malware. They were also using more than 1,100 domain names registered solely to serve as command-and-control servers or to send spear phishing messages targeting specific workers within a company to entice them to open a malicious e-mail attachment or Web link. No one is safe with carefully crafted and targeted messages, Stewart said.

“You have to to have that kind of paranoia to know anything you get that is unsolicited is suspicious,” he said. Companies should consider opening any unsolicited attachments and links, even from people who are known and trusted, in a virtual machine or a sanitized workstation in which an infection can be isolated.