Biography

Jude Milhon better known as St.Jude, was born on 12 March,1939 in Washington D.C. and because of that she adopted the American nationality, although she spent her teenage years in Indiana.

She became part of the nonconformist scene in the 1960s and actively participated in the civil rights movement. She was imprisoned repeatedly for civil disobedience.

She started programming in 1967, after reading a book called "Yeach Yourself Fortan". She worked as a programmer in a vending machine company for the Horn and Hardart self-service stores in Manhattan, but soon joined the hippy exodus to California and settled in Berkeley, where she began to encourage other women to join the emerging cyber culture. that she described as a "community of revolutionary left programmers" and that built the first public system of Red, the legendary project of the Memory Community in 1973.

The Network we now know as the Internet, then belonged to two groups: the United States military and a few universities and research institutes. BBS inspired the newsgroup system that led to the invention of Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web in 1989.

Jude toured the mythical BBS encouraging women to venture into the "pleasures of hacking" . Jude said that in hacking, as in sex, enters the activity of a desiring me. And where the mind-body conflict ends, liberation begins. Jude Milhon understood hacking as the desire to discover, curiosity, the challenge, but also a conflict: hacking is a martial art to defend oneself from politically correct, abusive laws and fanatics.

In the 1990s, she became editor-in-chief of the anarchic and technological journal Mondo 2000. In a 1999 interview she described piracy as a "martial art, a form of defense against politically correct politicians, overly intrusive laws, fanatics and narrow minded people of all tendencies. " And he defended the action of intelligently avoiding boundaries, whether imposed by governments or the laws of physics. The Network was their place of experimentation and personal discovery under a concept as simple and little implemented as that of unknown gender identity. In the late 1990s, Milhon continued to work as a web designer and Internet consultant.

She was an icon in the hacker world and was the savant defender of hackers since she advocated privacy and public use of the internet. She worked all her life as editor-in-chief until she died on July 19, 2003, aged 64, due to breast cancer.

Legacy

She was a hacker and author known for coining the term cypherpunk, she was a founding member of the cypherpunks, an association that grouped the defenders of digital privacy. She also motivate many women to be hacker through books that she wrote herself as "The Cyberpunk Handbook" (1995) and "How to Mutate and Take Over the World" (1996). He was also a member of the CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility).

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Milhon

https://mujeresconciencia.com/2017/03/12/jude-milhon/

https://hackstory.net/St._Jude

http://ensenadaderiazor.blogspot.com.es/2012/01/jude-milhon-hacker.html

By Cosmin Constantin