Soft Cache Hits and the Impact of Alternative Content Recommendations on Mobile Edge Caching

Caching popular content at the edge of future mobile networks has been widely considered in order to alleviate the impact of the data tsunami on both the access and backhaul networks. A number of interesting techniques have been proposed, including femto-caching and "delayed" or opportunistic cache access. Nevertheless, the majority of these approaches suffer from the rather limited storage capacity of the edge caches, compared to the tremendous and rapidly increasing size of the Internet content catalog. We propose to depart from the assumption of hard cache misses, common in most existing works, and consider "soft" cache misses, where if the original content is not available, an alternative content that is locally cached can be recommended. Given that Internet content consumption is increasingly entertainment-oriented, we believe that a related content could often lead to complete or at least partial user satisfaction, without the need to retrieve the original content over expensive links. In this paper, we formulate the problem of optimal edge caching with soft cache hits, in the context of delayed access, and analyze the expected gains. We then show using synthetic and real datasets of related video contents that promising caching gains could be achieved in practice

Interactional positioning and narrative self-construction in the first session of psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy

The purpose of this study is to identify possible session one indicators of end of treatment psychotherapy outcome using the framework of three types of interactional positioning; client’s self-positioning, client’s positioning between narrated self and different partners, and the positioning between client and therapist. Three successful cases of 8-session psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI) therapy were selected on the basis of client Beck Depression Inventory scores. One unsuccessful case was also selected against which identified patterns could be tested. The successful clients were more descriptive about their problems and demonstrated active rapport-building, while the therapist used positionings expressed by the client in order to explore the positionings developed between them during therapy. The unsuccessful case was characterized by lack of positive self-comment, minimization of agentic self-capacity, and empathy-disrupting narrative confusions. We conclude that the theory of interactional positioning has been useful in identifying patterns worth exploring as early indicators of success in PI therapy

A taxonomy of attacks using BGP blackholing

BGP blackholing is a common technique used to mitigate DDoS at-tacks. Generally, the victim sends in a request for traffic to the attacked IP(s) to be dropped. Unfortunately, remote parties may misuse blackholing [57, 29] and send requests for IPs they do not own, turning a defense technique into a new attack vector. As DDoS attacks grow in number, blackholing will only become more popular, creating a greater risk this service will be exploited. In this work, we de-velop a taxonomy of attacks combining hijacks with blackholing: BGP blackjacks (blackhole hijacks). We show that those attacks effectively grant more reach and stealth to the attacker than regular hijacks, and assess the usability of those attacks in various security deployments. We then find that routing security mechanisms for BGP [30, 31] do not provide an adequate protection against some of those at-tacks, and propose additional mechanisms to properly defend against or mitigate them