I’m not arguing against your username, but this article is about an Israeli malware campaign using ad bids to specifically target itself towards Starlink users. There’s nothing about Starlink itself being complicit.

I’d think if Starlink wanted to surveil their users (they probably do) they could find a more direct route than this (they probably have).

I’ve always just used a hyphen for ranges, without having any idea whether that makes me a philistine. A quick search says that, like most of this, it varies depending on who you ask.

Good luck in your rabbit hole!

For pedantry’s sake:

Two dashes – -- – in Markdown is usually rendered as an en-dash – more common in British-adjacent styles and usually surrounded by spaces.

Three dashes—---—in Markdown is rendered as an em-dash—more commonly associated with American styles and usually (though not always) without spaces.

The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC:

Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that’s a pretty long shot.