The article--and the press release it was written from--kinda oversells things here. Looking through the article, it's about using a particular method (measuring properties of the distribution of galaxies) that builds on prior work (by the same group and others) out to about 5.6 billion years old, or about 7.1 billion light years away. Mainly, it builds on the idea that sound waves in the very early universe are detectable in the way galaxies are distributed. WMAP and Planck missions have already measured the flatness of the universe to about 0.4 percent...And Hubble (and other telescopes) have detected objects much farther away--but that isn't the point: this is the first time that the data and modeling from the BOSS program have been used to confirm that the universe is flat to this degree, that the Hubble constant is what other programs have estimated, and other nuances of the current Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory of the universe.