Rana

Yes, anyone is free to use RanaEngine without ever signing in or registering an account in the cloud. Additional features may be unlocked in any part of the Rana ecosystem when logged in to registered accounts and via subscriptions.

TLDR; Rana is based on open-source software, maintains compatibility with open protocols and industry standard APIs, and allows our webapp code to remain inspectable using standardized development tools in the browser. Rana can be considered “open-component”, “open-protocol”, and “source-visible” rather than “open-source” in the traditional sense of the term.

Long Version: Many of the core technologies used in the Rana ecosystem are open-source, and Rana will continue to give back and maintain many of our improvements and modifications to such projects for the benefit of the open-source ecosystem on our GitHub page at https://github.com/RanaEngine

Since RanaEngine itself is a local-first application, we will not be publishing source versions of our UI or UX code for the app itself, any of the cloud-driven expansions to the ecosystem, and will offer install-ready versions of our browser extensions and local applications to end-users.

For the core libraries and frameworks used for AI/ML and data formats, the distributed storage graph system, and many more core features related to the Distributed Web, Semantic Web, and Fediverse technologies, these will remain reliably open-sourced with permissive licenses in order to encourage the growth of the overall web AI ecosystem, the communities built on top of them, and to encourage open-protocol adoption for the future of the Web.

If the browser becomes the operating system of the future, and local-first applications the default method of creating Web Apps, end-users can remain data sovereign, run fully inspectable code on their own devices, and create their own versions of compatible software, while also maintaining commercial opportunities for companies to build software that will remain interoperable with the rest of the Web by definition and at a fundamental level.

Yes, and Rana really does not want your data, we consider it a liability and it is of no benefit to us for our business model.

Throughout the Rana ecosystem, your data is stored locally by default and is private only to your own computers and nodes that you choose to share it with. Rana does not have the ability to read the data stored locally on your own devices, nor do we load any tracking scripts that could leak metadata information about your usage of the system by default. Requests made through Rana-hosted relay servers may be observed transiently, but will not be logged by our systems or retained any longer than is necessary to route the traffic.

If you choose to participate in the RanaNetwork, whether buying or selling compute services, limited identity and payment information will need to be stored by Stripe for subscriptions, credit purchases, and other monetary participation in the RanaNetwork.

This is a GDPR-compliant site performance measurement script from CloudFlare Web Analytics that does not individually identify users, leak any private user data, or install tracking cookies or pixels of any kind, it has nothing to do with user tracking, advertising, or marketing, and is intended solely for measuring page loading performance.

Some adblockers choose to block even privacy-respecting performance measurement scripts like this, so Rana has been designed to work properly whether or not this script is able to load, it will not affect site functionality either way.

As private as we can currently make it, given the architecture of the World Wide Web as a whole. Since almost all users access the Internet through firewall-protected networks, RanaEngine requires the use of relay servers in order to facilitate communication between nodes and among users. Users are free to stand up their own relay servers or specify whichever ones they prefer, without losing any core functionality of RanaEngine. Please see the documentation for more details.

RanaEngine uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to implement communication directly between users without the need for anyone in the middle, for efficiency, scalability, and privacy of the overall ecosystem. Any time users on each end of a P2P connection communicate with each other, they may risk exposing their IP Address to the other party and disclosing high-level and imprecise geo-location data (roughly city-level).

In order to protect our users personal privacy and to further obscure geo-location data, we recommend using RanaEngine with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or proxy service. One free option is WARP, which also has the benefit of speeding up certain parts of Rana’s cloud features for end-users using WARP in addition to improving privacy.

The only cloud infrastructure that RanaEngine depends on is as follows:

• The ability to load the RanaEngine code from https://ranaengine.app or equivalent CloudFlare domain
• The ability to communicate with at least 1 RanaRelay server (user defined, or Rana defaults)
• For subscribers, the ability to access private TURN servers for higher data synchronization performance

For other parts of the Rana ecosystem, please refer to their respective FAQs for details.

No, in fact Rana was invented as a means of using GPUs for productive compute jobs, instead of participating in web3 and cryptocurrency systems that derive their value from speculative work only.

More details of our vision for a decentralized and distributed web can be found in our blog.

No, the Internet itself was designed to be a decentralized ecosystem for connecting distributed devices, and many of these technologies have existed long before and will continue to live long after web3. There are many visions of the future using distributed and decentralized technologies and many different payment systems, so we would rather not be constrained by any particular set of technologies when building towards our vision.

Rana can be considered a "web0" application ecosystem, as described here: https://web0.small-web.org/

Our goal is to help build a Decentralized Web (“DWeb”), but without the need for blockchain, cryptocurrencies, or similar systems fueled by speculation and value-extraction, and instead want to build and encourage value-creation and distributed enfranchisement for all of our users.

It is extremely easy to integrate with the Rana ecosystem in a variety of ways. The easiest method is to use the Rana Local API powered by RanaTools, available on your local computer where RanaTools is running. This method offers full programmatic control over all of your nodes and clusters while also keeping your connection private to your own device.

For larger software systems and organizations, subscribers can access the Rana Remote API through their account settings by logging in to Rana.ai and setting up an optional endpoint.

For developers who want to interface with Rana data, the best way to do this is either through integrating with RanaPod using Solid Protocol (https://solidproject.org). This offers the most reliable data persistence and features for building Semantic Web applications, since stored objects may become DNS addressable when stored in a SolidPod or RanaPod in the cloud.

If you need lower-level access to Rana data, you can access this by using the Graph Universe Node ecosystem of tools since this is how Rana synchronizes data across nodes.

Rana does not disclose any user information beyond what is strictly necessary to power 3rd-party logins for these integrations, although since Rana does not control the privacy practices of 3rd-party services, you will need to refer to each 3rd-party login provider’s specific Privacy Policy to determine the degree of privacy and trustworthiness.

It is possible that such 3rd-party services could drop tracking cookies into a user’s browser that could then be matched against information from other websites, and it is recommended that users monitor both the scripts that run and cookies that are set by 3rd-party domains in your browser using built-in browser developer tools when using 3rd-party logins.