Enlarge (credit: Ruslan Habalov)

The data could be extracted through what’s known as a side-channel vulnerability in the browsers’ implementation of new standards for cascading style sheets introduced in 2016. One of the new features known as the “mix-blend-mode” leaked visual content hosted on Facebook to websites that included an iframe linking to it and some clever code to capture the data. Normally, a security concept known as the same-origin policy forbids content hosted on one domain to be available to a different domain. The vulnerability was significant because it allowed hackers to bypass this bedrock principle for two of the Internet’s most widely used browsers.

The leak was independently discovered by two different research teams, and it was fixed late last year in version 63 of Chrome and two weeks ago in Firefox 60. While the updated browsers no longer pose a threat to user privacy, one of the researchers who discovered the vulnerability said the increasingly powerful graphics capabilities being added in the HTML5 and CSS standards are likely to make similar hacks possible in the future.

Enlarge (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

According to The New York Times, today the EPA formally submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget its proposal to roll back the fuel economy rules that former President Obama signed off on in the last months of his presidency. The rules would have pushed automakers to keep reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of their vehicles out to 2025.

Soon after President Trump took office, automakers complained to the administration that complying with the EPA’s greenhouse gas standards would be too costly, despite having taken part in the negotiations that led to the Obama administration’s fuel economy standards. But critics said the auto industry was overplaying the potential harm. A third-party study from the International Council on Clean Transportation found that the technology needed to achieve the 2025 fuel economy standards was even more cost-effective than it had been when the Obama-era standards were negotiated.