Hackers Lose a Patron Saint

23/07/2003 Written by Michelle Delio

If there is a heaven, the angels are in for a hell of a time when Jude Mil­hon, the Internet’s real and very earthy patron saint of hack­ing, shows up.

Bet­ter known on the Inter­net by her nom de plume, St. Jude, Mil­hon died on July 19 of can­cer. Her age was an issue Mil­hon obvi­ously decided not to address.Even her clos­est friends could only guess at it, and they admit­ted they could be off by as much as a decade.

St. Jude wasn’t your typ­i­cal saint.

She was a staunch advo­cate of the joys of hack­ing, geek sex and a woman’s right to choose to use tech­nol­ogy. She fig­ured life was too short to waste wor­ry­ing about what other peo­ple might think, and was also known for her very col­or­ful way with the Eng­lish lan­guage.

Back when the Inter­net was pop­u­lated pri­mar­ily by men, she encour­aged and helped other women to get online.

“Girls need modems!” she said in a Feb­ru­ary 1995 Wired mag­a­zine inter­view.

“She cer­tainly was an icon of the infancy of the wired gen­er­a­tion,” said secu­rity con­sul­tant Robert Fer­rell. “We wouldn’t be what we are with­out her, and for that, if for no other rea­son, she will be sorely missed.”

Mil­hon also believed in learn­ing how to hack “as a mar­tial art — a way of defend­ing against polit­i­cally cor­rect politi­cians, overly intru­sive laws, big­ots and narrow-​minded peo­ple of all per­sua­sions,” accord­ing to an e-​mail she sent to this reporter in Sep­tem­ber 1999.

And she par­tic­u­larly wanted to intro­duce women to the joys of hack­ing.

“Women may not be great at phys­i­cal alter­ca­tions, but we sure excel at rapid-​fire key­board­ing,” Mil­ton wrote in that Sep­tem­ber e-​mail.

“We should look at the Inter­net as the life-​skills school so many of us girls never attended, and get out there and learn to con­quer our fears of not being nice enough, not being polite enough, not being strong enough, not being pretty enough, or smart enough or any­thing enough.”

Her def­i­n­i­tion of hack­ing — “the clever cir­cum­ven­tion of imposed lim­its, whether imposed by your gov­ern­ment, your own skills or the laws of physics” — has been widely quoted in many news sto­ries and mag­a­zine arti­cles.

Mil­hon may be most her­alded, at least among tech­ni­cally inclined women, for her guide­book to “real-​time non­vir­tual sex.”

Writ­ten for girl geeks, Hack­ing the Wet­ware: The NerdGirl’s Pil­low Book was a guide intended to turn women into happy hack­ers by demys­ti­fy­ing the work­ings of both the body and the brain.

“While lur­ing you with sex, (this book) is sub­tly train­ing you to think like a hacker. You think, there­fore you hack … it’s a become-​it-​yourself guide.” Mil­hon said in an e-​mail describ­ing the book’s “hid­den agenda.”

The orig­i­nal ver­sion of Wet­ware was released on the Inter­net in the spring of 1994. Mil­hon later reis­sued it, again on the Net, under a new title: The Joy of Hacker Sex.

“St. Jude taught me that it isn’t nec­es­sary to have big boobs to be a sex god­dess. All you really need is a big brain and the right atti­tude,” said Unix pro­gram­mer Nadine Ulmer.

Mil­hon is also the author of The Cyber­punk Hand­book and How to Mutate and Take Over the World. The lat­ter book was co-​authored with R.U. Sir­ius, co-​founder and for­mer edi­tor of tech cul­ture mag­a­zine Mondo 2000, where Mil­hon was a senior edi­tor.

Mil­hon began pro­gram­ming in 1967 for the Horn and Hardart automats in Man­hat­tan, after read­ing the book Teach Your­self For­tran. She was a found­ing mem­ber of Cypher­punks, a loosely orga­nized group of dig­i­tal pri­vacy advo­cates (Mil­hon also coined the name Cypher­punk) and was a mem­ber of Com­puter Pro­fes­sion­als for Social Respon­si­bil­ity — a group that she cheer­fully described as a “lefto-​revolutionist pro­gram­ming com­mune.”

CPSR formed the Com­mu­nity Mem­ory Project in 1973, widely believed to be the very first pub­lic online com­puter system.