Cease and desist from Signal incoming, from their legal terms:
> "Signal", Signal logos, and other trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Signal Technology Foundation in the United States and other countries (more info here).
I couldn't really find any details about any of these cases. Some of the names there too are pretty strange like "Tobaccopedia" and "Kraft LLC vs Kraft ULC". ULCs (as far as I know) are a Canadian thing and I highly doubt I can just go an open a company called "Cocacola ULC" in Canada?
Those examples look like LLM generated nonsense, though correct me if I'm wrong.
The example usually taught in school for this sort of thing is the trademark for Aspirin. Aspirin is a Bayer brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, but Bayer didn't defend its trademark in most of the world. In most countries (including the US) courts ruled that Aspirin is a generic term and anybody could use it. That's not the case for say Tylenol (acetaminophen) or Advil (ibuprofen) for example.
"German pharmaceutical firm Bayer was forced to give up its rights to the Aspirin trademark in the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, which followed its defeat in World War One (it also lost the rights to Heroin, but in hindsight it's probably not so upset about that).
The punishment only applied to aspirin's use in victor nations the USA, UK and France, leaving Bayer's trademark still enforceable elsewhere."
“Elsewhere” being literally meaning else where. I wasn’t alive in 1919, though my understanding from the literature is that “the American public didn’t like the German”. Like how they didn’t like the Irish before that. Then how they don’t like the Japanese in 1940s, the north Koran in 1956, then the Vietnamese in 1950-60s, then the Arabs in the 1970s-2000s, then the Chinese in the 2010s-today.
You're looking at AI slop because somebody made something up and had the machine riff along with it. You can very well have the LLM generate you a bunch of cases "proving" that it's illegal to have a pet cat or that in France everybody is legally required to smoke.
In fact trademark lawyers would prefer you to believe that if you're spending $1 on like, making the trademarked product rather than giving them the dollar to "defend" your trademark that's a false economy because magically a court will tear up your trademark because you were supposed to spend all that money on lawyers. If they can argue they really believed this was true (e.g. they read nonsense hallucinated into existence by AI) they're not even lying to you, it's just super convenient that they falsely believed something which directly benefited them...
My SaaS is sending monitoring notifications using signal-cli, and I regularly run into rate limits (enforced by Signal servers, not signal-cli), especially when sending to new numbers/usernames.
To the author--do you have any plans on how to work around that?
GP is presumably asking what their plans are once the service gets popular, runs into the ratelinit, and cannot send any notifications at all (or with significant delays) to the clients.
Does it matter? It's a SaaS anyways, so if they wanted to go rogue and use it to eavesdrop on your chats open source wouldn't really prevent that. They even specifically recommend using a dedicated group chat for notification purposes. For self-hosted deployments there's already a multitude of projects that expose an API to send signal messages.
Seems interesting but it looks like some cli with web server running on someone else's machine, so basically no security, no encryption. Also probably this bot have an access to your entire chat history.
The bot has access to any sent messages to yourself, plus any chatter in group chats if you have enabled that. So don't use it for sensitive stuff, and use a dedicated group. It was developed to relay sensor data and such, not war plans.
I understand the reference and I appreciate that.
Though the whole point of using signal is to have privacy.
If you need outside person to send you some messages than that privacy is non existent.
Now, I do not plan wars with Yemen but still want to keep my private conversations with my wife about my furniture, well... private. For solving notifications I can just do what I do now: selfhost matrix and apprise.
So the whole solution seems interesting, though I fail to see point of using it whatsoever.
If you could self host it yourself too? Yes but like that? No.
Nice! I was considering setting up telegram/slack/discord for personal push notifications of events in personal IT infrastructure, since Signal is fairly undercooked in this department, but this might be a good solution for me.
Better docs would be appreciated! Can you guide us to use it? I’m not a slack guy because it’s too distracting, but easy secure chat integrations could be big … keep it up!
If you don't know what "API" or "webhooks" are, then you're probably not the target audience. That's fine. Your aunt probably doesn't know what an "enterprise workload engine"[1] is, but that doesn't mean vmware needs to provide a dumbed down description so everyone can understand.
"Receive messages on Signal via a simple API. Perfect for notifications and alerts." is not "how it works" but "how you use it".
This is "hacker news". A hacker is typically interested in how something works (under the hood).
If a hacker asks "how does this mobile phone work?" then they are not looking for "well here you press a button and then here you speak" but something about radio waves and cell towers and mobile operating systems.
You built this? Would you like to comment what your future plans are?
Your self-description is "entrepreneur love for automation". Is it fair to assume that if this takes off then you are planning to introduce paid plans (perhaps with some revenue sharing with the signal folks to lift rate limits for you)?
I built this for fun and my own notifications. I don't think there's much commercial value here since there's zero moat. But it would be nice if we could raise funds for Signal.
> "Signal", Signal logos, and other trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Signal Technology Foundation in the United States and other countries (more info here).
SignalBot was made by gwillem and is free to use.
Those examples look like LLM generated nonsense, though correct me if I'm wrong.
The example usually taught in school for this sort of thing is the trademark for Aspirin. Aspirin is a Bayer brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, but Bayer didn't defend its trademark in most of the world. In most countries (including the US) courts ruled that Aspirin is a generic term and anybody could use it. That's not the case for say Tylenol (acetaminophen) or Advil (ibuprofen) for example.
The punishment only applied to aspirin's use in victor nations the USA, UK and France, leaving Bayer's trademark still enforceable elsewhere."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-27026704
In fact trademark lawyers would prefer you to believe that if you're spending $1 on like, making the trademarked product rather than giving them the dollar to "defend" your trademark that's a false economy because magically a court will tear up your trademark because you were supposed to spend all that money on lawyers. If they can argue they really believed this was true (e.g. they read nonsense hallucinated into existence by AI) they're not even lying to you, it's just super convenient that they falsely believed something which directly benefited them...
To the author--do you have any plans on how to work around that?
Personal i wouldn't rely on those notifications and just stick with good working notification services.
https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api
https://github.com/caronc/apprise
-no login, almost no security
-sometimes it does not works and there are no logs to see what exactly happens.
-secret storage is very bad
Ntfy I will check thanks.
That's because the goal is to allow you to stick a proper nginx or webserver infront of it if you need this layer.
> Sometimes doesn't work
Please open a ticket and share why since your able to determine this from your logs. Maybe it can be fixed upstream?
> Secret storage is bad
You can create a string (key) that is randomized > 200+ characters. What can be improved to assist you with your concerns?
Now, I do not plan wars with Yemen but still want to keep my private conversations with my wife about my furniture, well... private. For solving notifications I can just do what I do now: selfhost matrix and apprise.
So the whole solution seems interesting, though I fail to see point of using it whatsoever.
If you could self host it yourself too? Yes but like that? No.
I use it for RSS news, device notifications, debugging,...
This so good, I'm afraid it might go away.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/signal_messenger/
curl -d 'something' <your url>
Very good
Why is this information not present on the front page?
And why does somebody who thinks people would start using and relying on it not immediately understand that that's important information?
>Who is behind this
SignalBot − built by gwillem © 2025
contact (link to a signal group)
>and how does it work?
"Receive messages on Signal via a simple API. Perfect for notifications and alerts."
"curl -d ' Houthi alert' https://signalbot.one/api/..."
If you don't know what "API" or "webhooks" are, then you're probably not the target audience. That's fine. Your aunt probably doesn't know what an "enterprise workload engine"[1] is, but that doesn't mean vmware needs to provide a dumbed down description so everyone can understand.
https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere
This is "hacker news". A hacker is typically interested in how something works (under the hood).
If a hacker asks "how does this mobile phone work?" then they are not looking for "well here you press a button and then here you speak" but something about radio waves and cell towers and mobile operating systems.
> > Who is behind this
> SignalBot − built by gwillem © 2025
When I looked, this information wasn't there. Only the "buy me a coffee" link. Now it is, thanks.
Your self-description is "entrepreneur love for automation". Is it fair to assume that if this takes off then you are planning to introduce paid plans (perhaps with some revenue sharing with the signal folks to lift rate limits for you)?
Like... Sure! let me just give you my PHONE NUMBER THAT LINKS DIRECTLY BACK TO MY REAL-WORLD IDENTITY so that I can send "secure" text messages.
Signal promoters are clowns.