# CWE-361 - 7PK - Time and State

Improper management of time and state.

* In an environment that supports simultaneous or near-simultaneous computation by multiple systems, processes, or threads.

Distributed computation is about time and state.

* for more than one component to communicate, **state must be shared**, and all that takes time.

Programmers anthropomorphize their work.

* They think about one thread of control carrying out the entire program **in the same way they would if they had to do the job themselves**.

Modern computers switch between tasks very quickly.

* In multi-core, multi-CPU, or distributed systems, **two events may take place at exactly the same time**.

Unexpected interactions between threads, processes, time, and information.

* These interactions happen through shared state: semaphores, variables, the file system, and, **basically, anything that can store information**.