NASA has been catching some extra criticism in the past few days after The Houston Chronicle—Johnson Space Center's hometown paper—ran an expose on credit card abuses at the agency.

The paper reportedly reviewed 451,000 transactions, and among plenty of apparently legitimate purchases, found that NASA employees had also bought iPods, video games and jewelry. The first two you might be able to slide past accounting, if you were, say, an astronaut doing isolation chamber testing, and needed a few gadgets and games to pass the time.

Used to be, you had to connect your PC to the Internet first before it became bloated with viruses and spyware. Now all it may take is plugging in a brand new iPod or digital picture frame—recently, new peripheral devices have been arriving in stores with viruses pre-installed. The problem is most likely stemming from poor quality control in Chinese factories when devices are tested before packaging. As office IT personnel well know, all it takes is one infected machine to spoil the entire network.

A: As my mama once told me, there’s no such thing as a completely free iPod. But in this case, she may have been wrong.

Many of the sites in question—FreeiPods.com, FreePSPs.com, FreeDesktopPCs.com, FreeFlatScreens.com—come from one company, Gratis Network, which has earned a reputation as being fairly legit by actually giving away thousands of free items. So what’s the catch?